Over $250 billion swindled from US pandemic fund – report
RT | March 11, 2023
More than $250 billion in Covid-19 relief funds were lost to “fraud” and “waste,” the directors of three US government agencies testified before the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee on Thursday.
Compounding what Deputy Inspector General Sheldon Shoemaker of the Small Business Administration (SBA) called “the biggest fraud in a generation,” the officials stressed that the figures they gave represented an extremely conservative estimate of the total amount lost as they did not include the amount defrauded from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
According to a statement submitted by Shoemaker ahead of the hearing, the SBA has already uncovered $190.7 billion in potential fraud across relief programs under its jurisdiction. Specifically, it expects to find upwards of $100 billion within the scandal-plagued Paycheck Protection Program. Acting Treasury Inspector General Richard Delmar admitted to just $2.6 billion in dubious charges confirmed at his agency, pleading that ongoing audits precluded making an estimate of the full cost.
Larry Turner, inspector general of the Department of Labor, blamed the massive losses on a lack of preparation, insufficient oversight, and even the government’s generosity, making a “highly conservative” estimate of $76 billion in fraudulent spending. With no functioning system in place to verify applicants’ qualifying details in a reasonable time frame, the “unprecedented infusion of federal funds” into the program made it irresistible to fraudsters, he told the subcommittee.
Rep. Keith Mfume (D-Maryland) expressed shock that no one had predicted that requiring only “self-certification” to access such a prodigious cash hoard would lead to “a lot of hanky-panky,” while Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) pointed out that the agencies did not even use existing checks and balances to vet applicants, and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida) highlighted that state unemployment systems were hopelessly outdated even before the pandemic placed them under unprecedented stress. Of $45.6 billion in potential fraud lent out in association with one Labor Department program, Turner acknowledged upon questioning that $267 million had gone to dead people.
Asked about the possibility of recovering the money, Turner said that hunting down the perpetrators was financially unrewarding, as “once money goes out the door, it is hard to get it back.” Even in cases where the government has been able to track down Covid-19 benefit fraudsters and claw back some of the funds, the inspectors general were unable to tell subcommittee members what had become of some of the money.
More than $5 trillion in pandemic relief funds have been distributed since 2020. By some estimates, as much as $400 billion was stolen from the unemployment relief program alone.
Georgia ‘lost chance for sovereignty’ – Moscow
RT | March 10, 2023
The US opposed Georgia’s “foreign agents” bill because Washington does not want the country to have political sovereignty, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, said on Friday.
He argued that the legislation, which was withdrawn after protests and clashes with police in Tbilisi, was aimed at limiting Washington’s ability to meddle in Georgia’s affairs.
“Washington has used the tools of soft power to lead people to the streets. The Georgian authorities were forced to submit – not to the will of the people, but to the United States,” Volodin claimed in a post in his Telegram channel.
The politician said the bill was “unacceptable for the US” because it would have “restricted Washington’s influence on the country’s internal political affairs.”
“With its withdrawal by the parliament, Georgia has lost the chance for sovereignty,” Volodin said.
On Friday, Georgian Dream and People’s Power, two of the country’s ruling parties, withdrew the Transparency of Foreign Influence Bill, also dubbed the ‘Foreign Agents Law.’ They said the bill had led to “divisions in society” and that its intent and purpose has been distorted by “a machine of lies.”
The proposed law would have required individuals, NGOs and media outlets that receive 20% or more of their funding from abroad to register as “an agent of foreign influence” with the Georgian Justice Ministry, according to Reuters. Offenders would have faced fines and up to five years in prison for failing to comply.
The bill was condemned by Washington, the EU and NATO. US State Department spokesman Ned Price voiced concerns about “the potential implications of this law for freedom of speech and democracy in Georgia” and warned that its adoption “could potentially undermine Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”
Price later welcomed the decision to withdraw the draft law and urged MPs to “officially retract this bill and not to further this type of legislation.”
Proponents of the bill argued that it resembled the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a 1938 law that requires individuals and organizations to register as “foreign agents.” Opponents, however, claimed that the bill was inspired by a similar law in Russia that was passed in 2012.
Protests in Georgia, pressure campaign or anti-Russian color revolution?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 09.03.2023
Protesters spilled into the streets of Tbilisi this week to protest a draft law requiring NGOs to register as “agents of foreign influence” if 20% or more of their funds come from foreign sources. What are the protesters looking to achieve? How have Georgia’s Western “partners” responded? What role, if any, has Russia played? Sputnik investigates.
Georgia’s governing coalition “unconditionally” withdrew its foreign agents law from parliament on Thursday morning, folding to protesters after two nights of violent confrontations with police in the Caucasus nation’s capital, and growing pressure from the European Union and the United States to scrap the draft legislation.
“As a party of government responsible to every member of society, we have decided to unconditionally withdraw this bill that we supported,” the Georgian Dream Party, which has 74 of 150 seats in the republic’s parliament, said in a statement Thursday morning.
Giga Lemonjala, a member of the opposition Droa party, responded to the government’s announcement by demanding that the bill be formally denounced, and that all protesters detained over the past two nights be released.
Georgia’s opposition and Western media covering the protests have characterized the foreign agents legislation as a “Russian,” “Russia-stylem” or “Putin-style” law, citing the 2012 Russian law requiring media, non-governmental organizations, and others to register as foreign agents and make their funding sources known to the public if they include contributions from foreign entities. Some media went so far as to claim the Georgian legislation signaled Tbilisi’s drift away from the European Union and toward Russia, with one article going so far as to call the social democratic, pro-EU Georgian ruling party “Putin’s Georgian Dream.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price characterized the draft law as “Kremlin-inspired” and said Washington was “deeply troubled” by it, with the legislation deemed to be “incompatible with the people of Georgia’s clear desire for European integration and its democratic development.”
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell echoed these sentiments, calling the bill a “very bad development” and saying it is “incompatible with EU values and standards,” and “goes against Georgia’s stated objective of joining the European Union.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also waded in to commenting on the crisis, praising Ukrainian flag-wielding protesters and saying Kiev expects Georgia and Moldova to join Ukraine in the EU.
Moscow has for the most part stayed out of commenting on the Georgian unrest, absent Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s remarks Wednesday pointing out that the draft law looked similar to US legislation passed in 1938 known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s statement Thursday encouraging Russian nationals in Georgia to stay out of the streets.
Rules for Me But Not For Thee
Russia’s role has effectively been that of a boogieman, designed to discredit the Georgian government and foment discontent, both in Georgia and among Tbilisi’s Western partners, says Shota Apkhaidze, a political scientist serving as director of the Caucasus Center of Islamic Studies. The reality, the Tbilisi-based observer points out, is that the now-scrapped legislation bears much more resemblance to FARA than it does to Russian legislation.
“This is literally double standards, a mockery. The US brazenly adopted this same law 80 years ago, in 1938, and tightened it up repeatedly. Similar laws are in force in several countries in Europe. They tell us this law is ‘Russian,’ even though it has nothing to do with Russia. These are absolutely different things. In other words, we adopted a draft law modeled on American legislation, that’s in accordance with the Georgian Constitution and the law on non-governmental organizations. What does Russia have to do with it? What does Putin have to do with anything?” Apkhaidze asked. “This is just another reason to completely undermine the political system and bring the country to a change of power. That’s what the Americans are after,” the observer said.
Inconvenient Law
International affairs expert Viktoria Fedosova says US and EU consternation over the Georgian draft law is understandable, since it threatens to undermine their immense political power in the Caucasus nation.
“The passage of such a law in Georgia was risky for the US and the EU, since they’ve become used to engaging in their own financing, introducing their own leaders of public opinion, and working [in the country] through non-governmental organizations. This is their typical umbrella-like scheme of operations familiar to them,” Fedosova, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts at the Russian People’s Friendship University, told Sputnik in an interview.
“The Americans have spent about $1 billion on our non-governmental organizations since 1993, with the US declaring that these funds were spent on developing civil society, human rights, etc.” Apkhaidze pointed out. “That’s not the case. On the contrary, these funds have consistently been spent on fomenting a coup d’état, on the financing of some destructive elements in Georgia,” he said.
US and European “democracy promotion” assistance to Georgia has come in various forms over the decades, from the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Democratic Institute to US hedge fund billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Each of these groups provide millions or tens of millions of dollars to Georgian NGOs annually, and wield tremendous power beyond the realm of traditional party politics, Apkhaidze says.
“The NGO sector is the strongest structure of civil institutions in Georgia, because they have massive funding. Everyone, even the current leadership of Georgia, comes from precisely these kinds of organizations and foundations,” he said. “They have immense influence.”
Cynical Approach
The US and EU’s record and history of violating Georgia’s sovereignty is no secret to anyone, but their behavior and response to this week’s violence constitutes outright “mockery” of Tbilisi, Apkhaidze says.
“Why is it that in Georgia, a person who throws a Molotov cocktail at a police officer and sets a police car on fire, hits a special forces agent in the head with a rebar and smashes the parliament building, why is he deemed ‘peaceful’ – and his protest a ‘peaceful protest’?” the observer asked, alluding to the dozens of police officers who have been injured, some hospitalized, over the past two days in clashes with demonstrators.
Fedosova thinks the answer is obvious – while the US is able to pass laws like FARA and use them liberally to monitor their media, politics, and social groups for signs of foreign influence and meddling, the same luxury is not afforded to countries like Georgia.
“The United States cannot allow this kind of sovereignty be enjoyed by tiny Georgia, which, moreover, has already been used as a destabilizing factor against Russia (we remember the situation in 2008),” she said.
‘Second Front’
The irony of the crisis over the foreign agents draft law is that the Georgian Dream government is broadly pro-European, with stated aims including entry into both the EU and NATO. Accordingly, both Apkhaidze and Fedosova believe that the crisis is related to the pragmatic foreign policy approach that Tbilisi has taken in relation to its northern neighbor, especially after the escalation of the Ukraine crisis last year.
“The Americans have spent a whole year now since the start of Russia’s ‘special operation’ in Ukraine destabilizing the situation,” trying to get Georgia to join anti-Russian sanctions and “open a second front” against Moscow, Apkhaidze said.
“The Americans know that if they manage to quickly remove Georgian Dream, a second front would be opened immediately, because those flakes who came out to protest want this war, many of them unconsciously, of course; they have no idea what such a conflict would bring. But they are so short-sighted (I mean the majority of young people involved) that they don’t understand what a war with Russia would bring. Others have the concrete goal of opening a second front. The Americans are leading the country precisely in this direction,” he said.
The Georgian government and lawmakers’ attempts to prevent Tbilisi from being pulled into a direct conflict against Russia, notwithstanding the not always rosy relations with Moscow, is precisely the reason the foreign agents law was put together in the first place, Fedosova believes, citing the fact that a handful of NGOs have garnered more financial support over the past year than all the country’s political parties combined.
“The main thing [for the government] is the guarantee of peace, some kind of fair compromise-based dialogue with Russia, without attempts to include the country in a new conflict on Russia’s borders. The main thing for them is to convey this idea of preserving sovereignty and not losing new territories, and to communicate this to their citizens,” the observer said.
Maidan Danger
Fedosova observed parallels between the footage coming out of Tbilisi this week and the Euromaidan in Kiev before the 2014 coup. “We are watching footage now from Tbilisi where young people jump and dance, where the [psychological] mechanisms for creating this kind of emotional bond of the crowd are used. We’re seeing everything we saw on the Maidan. But here the presence of external forces hasn’t yet reached the point where the American ambassador comes out and distributes cookies, for example. So far, we are seeing the manifestation of the Americans in this conflict only in the form of their official statements.”
If the situation heats up, more parallels to the Ukrainian coup could appear, she noted, including radicals in crowds, agent provocateurs, mysterious snipers, culminating in a coup and the appointment of a new puppet government and “the installation of an authoritarian president who will be called a liberal.”
“We see how this happened with Zelensky – how ‘liberal’ his regime turned out to be, and what laws were adopted when everything goes according to the American scenario, and the country is integrated into a full-fledged military confrontation with Russia…They need Georgia as another means to prick Russia, just from another flank,” Fedosova said.
President vs Parliament
In the course of her official visit to the US this week, Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili appeared against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty to express support for the protesters. “I am by your side. Today you represent free Georgia. Georgia, which sees its future in Europe, will not allow anyone to take away this future,” Zourabichvili said.
Apkhaidze doesn’t find anything surprising about the Georgian president’s behavior, saying the French-born politician is simply serving the interests of her masters, and that her sympathies for the opposition have long been evident.
“Georgia is a parliamentary republic. I don’t think that will change. This is not the first time she has opposed various decisions of the Georgian leadership and parliament… As far as Zourabichvili is concerned, she, of course serves the interests, first of fall, of her masters. I can’t figure out whether she’s the president of Georgia or the governor of some American state. But it is a fact that she wants more power, and sees herself in the place of [Georgian Prime Minister Irakli] Garibashvili,” Apkhaidze summed up.
British SAS Soldiers Posing as Arms Dealers Scour World for Shells for Ukraine
By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 08.03.2023
Ukraine has run through its stockpiles of arms and ammunition — inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991 — along with weapons supplied by its NATO backers since Russia launched its military operation to defend the Donbass republics.
A team of SAS commandoes are reportedly scouring the world for stocks of Russian-calibre artillery shells to refill Ukraine’s depleted arsenals.
A British daily newspaper reported that a dozen special forces troopers have been travelling across Africa, the Middle East and Asia along with intelligence agents and Foreign Office officials.
The group, posing as arms dealers, carry “substantial amounts of cash” to buy up stocks of 122mm-calibre shells — fired by many of the artillery pieces Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union — on the spot.
“Our people have sources all over the world who will know if there is any ammo available and who to contact to strike a deal,” one military source said. “It is not always easy — it has been a scramble with many dead ends — but there have also been successes.”
The team have already journeyed to Angola, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. But this week sources claimed a deal was struck on a stockpile in an unnamed European country.
Arms factories in both Bulgaria and Romania still produce Soviet-era arms and ammunition.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently begged his Western backers for more artillery, on top of his demands for fighter jets. “Artillery is the number one thing that we need. Both systems and ammunition — shells in large amounts,” he said.
US Army General Christopher Cavoli, the NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, has said the Ukrainian army fires around 100,000 shells per month compared to 600,000 from the Russian side — as Russian forces encircle the key city of Artemovsk (Bakhmut).
The reputed mission follows a failed attempt in the summer of 2022 to buy tens of thousands of rounds of 122mm ammunition from Pakistan, which has remained neutral in the conflict between Ukraine — with its NATO allies — and Russia.
The report claimed 40,000 shells were flown by RAF transport planes from Pakistan’s Nur Khan Air Base to Romania’s Cluj International Airport for delivery to a local arms dealer acting as a middleman.
However, none of those rounds made it to Ukraine. Unconfirmed rumours of quality control issues were superseded by Islamabad’s denial last month that it had allowed any ammunition to be transferred to the conflict zone.
“The reporting about supply of defence items by Pakistan to Ukraine is not accurate,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said on February 16.
“Pakistan maintains a policy of non-interference in military conflicts. Pakistan only exports defence stores to other states based on strong End Use and none re-transfer assurances,” Baloch stressed. “And this is the case of Pakistan’s position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.”
The Russian imperial army adopted the 122mm (4.8-inch) artillery calibre before the First World War. It remained in service after the 1917 revolution and throughout the Soviet era with the Red Army, and is still used by the modern Russian army and those of other former Soviet republics and Warsaw Treaty member states.
Before Russia launched its military operation, the Ukrainian army reportedly possessed around 440 122mm-calibre D-30 towed howitzers and 600 2S1 ‘Gvozdika’ (carnation), the armored self-propelled versions of the same gun — although most were in long-term storage at the time.
Daily reports by the Russian Ministry of Defence have reported the destruction at least 146 D-30s and 99 Gvozdikas since the start of the demilitarization operation.
US Foreign Policy Goes “Woke”?
Regime change in store for cultural conservatives?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 7, 2023
It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.
And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe. The early February visitor was Samantha Power, currently head of USAID, and a familiar figure from the Barack Obama Administration, where she served as Ambassador to the United Nations and was a dedicated liberal interventionist involved in the Libya debacle as well as various other wars started by that estimable Nobel Peace Prize recipient after he had received his award. The Obama attack on Syria has been sustained until this day, with several American military bases continuing to function on Syrian territory, stealing the country’s oil and agricultural produce.
USAID was founded in 1961 and it was intended to serve as a vehicle for nurturing democratic government and associated civic institutions among nations that had little or no experience in popular government. That role has become less relevant as nation states have evolved and the organization itself has responded by becoming more assertive in its role, pushing policies that have coincided with US foreign policy objectives. This has led some host nations to close down USAID offices. Within the US government itself, participants in foreign policy formulation often observe that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) now are largely in the business of doing what the CIA used to do, i.e. interfering in local politics by supporting opposition parties and other dissident or even terrorist groups. Both organizations were very active in Ukraine in 2014 and served as conduits for money transfers to the opposition parties and those who were hostile to Russia’s influence for “democracy building.”
Samantha Power, who is married to another Democratic Party affiliated power broker, lawyer Cass Sunstein, traveled to Hungary on her diplomatic passport but took pains to cover her travel as a routine bureaucratic visit to an overseas post. Hungary is undeniably a democracy, is a member of the European Union, and also of NATO, but Power reportedly did not clear the travel with the Hungarian government and apparently did not meet with any government officials, even as a courtesy. She tweeted that her visit was to reestablish USAID in the Hungarian capital, “Great to be here in Budapest with @USAmbHungary where @USAID just relaunched new, locally-driven initiatives to help independent media thrive and reach new audiences, take on corruption and increase civic engagement.”
By “independent media” Power clearly meant that the US will be directly supporting opposition press that is anti-government and which embraces the globalist-progressive view currently favored by the White House. A US Embassy press release on the visit revealed that Power was in town as part of a project to relaunch seven USAID programs throughout Eastern Europe. It did not elaborate on the “corruption” that Power intended to address, which, of course, would have been a direct insult to the local governments wherever she intended to visit, nor did the document reveal that many of the groups that will be supported are likely to be affiliated with “globalist” George Soros.
In Budapest, Samantha Power did indeed meet with opposition political figures and civil organizations and groups, with particular emphasis on the homosexual community including “Joined @divaDgiV, @andraslederer, and @viki radvanyi for lunch in Budapest where we spoke about their work to advocate for LGBTQI+ rights and dignity in Hungary and around the world @budapestpride” as described in one of her tweeted messages after arrival. Power was also accompanied throughout by the highly controversial US Ambassador David Pressman, who is openly homosexual, of course, married to a man, and who has been highly critical of the conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which was reelected in 2022 by a landslide margin in a vote that was considered free and fair. Orban is disliked by Joe Biden’s Washington because he is conservative and a nationalist, not because he is incompetent or dishonest while Pressman was and is a perfect example of the Biden State Department sending a terrible fit as ambassador to an extremely conservative country just to make points with the gay community in the US. Pressman has persisted in telling Hungarians how to behave not only on foreign policy but also on sexual diversity and cultural issues and, for his efforts, was finally told to “shut up” by Hungary’s Foreign Minister.
To be sure, Hungary’s undeniably democratic government, which is politically and economically tied to Washington, does not support the United States-led strategy to prolong and even escalate the Russia-Ukraine war and will not contribute to arming Ukraine. It does not accept “globalist” open immigration that seeks to challenge the established national culture, and also opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. It does not allow LGBTQ material to be presented to minors in state schools, which it considers to be morally correct anti-pedophilia legislation. For that reason, the time was clearly right, in the “woke” view of the Biden Administration, for Samantha Power to show up with a little dose of regime change in her portfolio. Hungarian officials had already expressed their concern over what they consider extreme pressure coming from the United States, largely because Hungary is a conservative country that values its culture and political independence. The visit by Power sent a signal to the Hungarian government and people that the pressure will likely increase and that Washington will not hesitate to use its embassies and overseas military bases to actively support groups that promote views that are not generally embraced by the local populations.
The Samantha Power story is of interest, to be sure, because it demonstrates that since the United States is the self-appointed enforcer of the “rules based international order” nothing in the world is off limits. Far too many US politicians and media pundits think that other states are not really sovereign and have to submit to US dictates in everything, and if they dare to step out of line they can be punished. If a conservative Christian country or leader – by which one might include Hungary, Russia or Brazil – believes that homosexuality or even abortion on demand are morally objectionable the US now believes that it has a mandate to use federal government resources to change that perception including by actively engaging with a foreign nation and its government on its own soil. To put it bluntly, the United States must certainly be considered the world leader in compelling all nations to conform to the political and moral values that it insists be adhered to.
So if one wants to learn why US Foreign Policy is so inept in terms of actually serving the interests of the American people, look no farther than was has happened and continues to roil in Ukraine as well as the implications of the Samantha Power visit to Hungary. For Foreign Service Posts, providing support for the agendas of the collection of freak shows that make up the Democratic Party has become manifestly as or even more important than promoting genuine national interests overseas or assisting American businesses and travelers.
What is perhaps most interesting is the way the “woke” foreign policy is being largely concealed from the American public and is being run as some kind of stealth operation. One initiative run by USAID in Macedonia in 2016 under President Obama included a $300,000 grant for “suitable” Macedonian applicants to “fund” a program entitled “LGBTI Inclusion” to counter how “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons continue to suffer discrimination and homophobic media content, both online and offline… Considerable efforts are still needed to raise awareness of and respect for diversity within society and to counter intolerance.” How many American taxpayers would be happy to learn that their hard-earned money has been going to support programs run in nonconsenting foreign democracies to make them more “woke?” Of course, no one in the Biden Administration is telling the public about it, nor is the story likely to appear in the mainstream media, so presumably no one will know!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Washington gives secret bailout to companies accused of war crimes in West Asia
The Cradle | March 6, 2023
US lawmakers last year secretly authorized a bailout for weapons makers for unproven inflation burden as part of the record-breaking 2023 annual defense budget, which allotted over $800 billion for defense spending.
The bailout provision, crafted behind closed doors and quietly added to the approved budget, allows for “extraordinary relief” via unchecked price hikes to Pentagon contracts in response to any alleged losses weapons makers experience “due solely to economic inflation.”
However, there are no requirements for defense contractors to prove their costs increased due to inflation alone. Earlier versions of the defense budget did not include this provision, and it was reportedly added by a handful of congressional negotiators without broader congressional input.
“The new law places no restrictions on when contractors may ask for increases in contract prices; the only requirement is that costs exceed the original agreed upon price,” Responsible Statecraft reports.
The bailout was approved despite the senate striking down a similar provision and defense contractors failing to demonstrate to the Pentagon that inflation was threatening their bottom line, as they have managed to report record profits despite the economic effects of the pandemic or the war in Ukraine.
As a result of this, US taxpayer money is now being earmarked to provide “profit insurance” to giant corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing.
Their profits are also bolstered by US officials covertly deploying troops and waging secret wars over the past two decades in dozens of countries across the globe.
US defense contractors have repeatedly been accused of having responsibility for countless war crimes committed in West Asia and other regions of the world.
Last week, a group of Yemeni nationals filed a lawsuit against several US weapons makers for their role in the bombing of a wedding and a funeral in Yemen.
“Year after year, the bombs fell – on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats, and a school bus – killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” reads the lawsuit.
Tulsi Gabbard Slams US ‘Warmongering Elite’ for Waging ‘Proxy War’ in Ukraine
Sputnik – 05.03.2023
Former US congresswoman and ex-presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has verbally slammed the Democratic Party establishment and US President Joe Biden himself over the conflict in Ukraine.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Gabbard told the audience that she parted ways with the Democratic Party because it fell “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers, led by the queen of warmongers herself, Hillary Clinton, and embodied by President Joe Biden.”
She accused Biden of pushing the United States to “the precipice of nuclear war,” which may well lead to the destruction of “the world as we know it,” and insisted that the Democratic Party is “focused on filling the pockets of their bosses in the military-industrial complex.”
She pointed at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, stating that Biden and “warmongers from both parties in the Congress” have already sent over $100 billion to fuel what she described as a “proxy war” waged by the US and NATO through the regime in Kiev against Russia.
“Last week, it was another $500 million. Yesterday, it’s another $400 million of our taxpayer money — continuing to escalate this war that could at any moment spark a direct conflict between the US and NATO and Russia, the world’s most nuclear-armed country,” Gabbard lamented.
Tulsi also blasted the “warmongering elite” in the United States which does not seem to care about the potentially catastrophic consequences of their actions. As she put it, this elite have the means to protect themselves and their families in case of a nuclear attack and they are fine with leaving the rest of the American people to perish in the ensuing armageddon.
“The reality is, though, it doesn’t need to be this way. Our future is in our hands. But we have no time to waste to protect our children, to protect our loved ones, to protect this country that we love,” Gabbard said. “We have to lift our voices and stand up to these cowardly warmongering positions in both parties and stop them from destroying us all.”
Top Scientists Find ‘Substantial Scientific Evidence’ RF Radiation Causes Cancer
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 3, 2023
Four of the world’s top experts in environmental health are calling for prevention and precaution when it comes to public exposure to radiofrequency (RF) radiation.
The scientists — including the former director of the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) — last month published a preprint review of the most recent studies on the effects of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) and RF radiation on different life forms and humans, and the epidemiological evidence for cancer due to RF radiation from cellphone use.
The authors concluded there is “substantial scientific evidence” that “RF radiation causes cancer, endocrinological, neurological and other adverse health effects” — and that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has failed to protect public health.
They accused the FCC of ignoring the “Precautionary Principle,” commonly used in toxicology, and also the Bradford Hill criteria, a set of principles commonly used in epidemiology for establishing a causal relationship, in evaluating the risks of RF radiation.
“This article is a clarion call for prevention and precaution,” said Devra Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H., a toxicologist and epidemiologist who co-authored the paper.
“We know enough now to take steps to reduce exposure to this. … It’s time,” said Davis, who also is founder and president of the Environmental Health Trust, and founding director of the Center for Environmental Oncology and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
The paper’s other authors are:
- Paul Ben Ishai, Ph.D., a physicist at Ariel University in Israel.
- Hugh Taylor, M.D., a professor and department chair of Obstetrics Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine.
- Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., a toxicologist and former director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the NTP.
Birnbaum and Taylor are members of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, the nation’s premier association of distinguished researchers.
Davis was founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council for the National Academy of Sciences, a private society of distinguished scholars.
Cumulatively, the four authors have published more than 1,600 peer-reviewed articles.
Davis told The Defender there is a “plethora” of experimental and epidemiological evidence that establishes a causal relationship between EMR-RF and cancer.
Studies also have shown that EMR/RF can cause DNA damage, and that it can adversely affect fetal development and the endocrine system.
“EMF/RF functions like a classic endocrine disruptor by impairing both male and female reproductive functions,” the authors said.
They pointed out that senior advisers to the World Health Organization, including Dr. Lennart Hardell, have said that if RF radiation were evaluated based on more current studies, it would likely be upgraded to a probable — if not confirmed — human carcinogen.
Davis said the paper is a “landmark” article — “but the landmark is built on the shoulders of a number of others,” she added.
Many researchers — including James Lin, Ph.D., Louis Slesin, Ph.D., Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., Lennart Hardell, M.D., Ph.D., Cindy Sage, M.A. and Dr. David Carpenter — have worked “relentlessly” on the issue of RF radiation, she said.
‘Industry-affiliated scientists’ distort public discourse on RF radiation
According to the authors, the public discourse around RF radiation has been distorted by some “fundamentally flawed” yet widely publicized reports — written by “industry-affiliated scientists” — purporting to show “no health risk.”
The paper evolved from the authors’ discussions of “several peer-reviewed papers that provided biased analysis, most notably the 2021 review by David Robert Grimes, Ph.D. published in JAMA Oncology,” Davis told Microwave News.
“It is imperative to insist on a complete picture of the evidence and not the whitewashed or distorted version currently promoted,” the authors said.
More independent research on RF radiation — free from bias by the telecom industry — is required. Without this, the authors said, “We are effectively conducting an uncontrolled experiment on ourselves, our families, and our children.”
The authors also criticized the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for dismissing many of the studies that have shown adverse effects from RF radiation, including the $30 million NTP study done in 2018, which showed “clear evidence” that electromagnetic radiation is associated with cancer and DNA damage.
According to Davis, the FDA’s rejection of the NTP study was “deeply flawed” and “deeply hypocritical.”
The FDA in 1999 requested the NTP study cellphone radiation, she said. FDA officials were intimately involved in reviewing the study design plans.
“Then when the results came out and some people didn’t like it, the FDA began to trash talk their own study,” Davis said.
Davis said the scientific and regulatory battle around RF radiation today reminded her and her co-authors of the earlier battle around tobacco.
“We were there in the early days when — believe it or not — 70% of surgeons smoked. And in the 1970s and 1980s, the tobacco industry gave the National Cancer Institute $11 million to study how to make a safe cigarette,” Davis said.
There was a scientific debate “that went on for years longer than it should have” about whether or not tobacco was safe for the environments of children.
“In 1983, when I was the executive director for the National Academy of Sciences Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, we put together a committee to answer the question of whether it was okay to have smoking on airplanes,” Davis said.
At the time, that was a scientific question, she said, adding that the committee — after reviewing the research — became the first in the world to issue a ban on smoking in airplanes.
Davis said scientists and the public realized the studies suggesting tobacco was safe were “manufactured” by the tobacco industry — and the same thing is happening now with RF radiation and the telecom industry, she added.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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