Time: 8:00pm.Admission: $20.00.Age restrictions: No Minors.Graham Elwood is headlining his new hour in preparation for his Netflix comedy special taping!
High
gasoline prices are the problem that President Joe Biden keeps trying
to fix — and roughly a year’s worth of extraordinary efforts have done
little to significantly lower costs.
With Biden’s latest push Wednesday to release 15 million barrels from the U.S. strategic reserve and consider additional withdrawals this winter, he’s telling frustrated voters ahead of the midterm elections that the White House hasn’t given up.
He
rejected the notion that politics played a role in his latest action.
But the issue has clear political implications as the president’s
approval rating has moved inversely with changes in gasoline prices,
which remain high despite coming down since a June peak.
“They’re
not falling fast enough,” Biden said in remarks at the White House.
“Families are hurting. You’ve heard me say it before, but I get it.”
Biden has consistently said that high prices are the fault of Russia invading Ukraine at the start of this year. Any
declines in gas prices — no matter their magnitude — the president
attributes to his policies. Biden denied his latest move was about the
upcoming elections, even though he told The Associated Press in an
interview earlier this year that his approval ratings seem to move in
the opposite direction from gas prices.
Laura Nyro did a song years ago about a man like Joe:
Hands off the man, the flim flam man. His mind is up his sleeve and his talk is make believe. Oh lord, the man's a fraud, he's flim flam man. He's so cagey, he's a flim flam man. Hands off the man, flim flam man. He's the one in the Trojan horse making out like he's Santa Claus. Oh lord, the man's a fraud, he's a flim flam man. He's a fox, he's a flim flam man. Everybody wants him, the people and the police and all the pretty ladies disarm. Oh yeah, the beautiful gent, you know he has hardly a cent. He pays his monthly rent with daily charm. Hands off the man, the flim flam man. His mind is up his sleeve and his talk is make believe. Oh lord, the man's a fraud, he's flim flam man. He's so cagey, he's an artist. He's a fox, he's a flim flam man. Don't believe him, he's a flim flam. Ole road runner, he's a flim flam.
That's Joe.
And that's a really a cool song. I've heard it all my life but never paid attention to the verses. (My folks are big fans of Laura Nyro.) She really nailed whomever she was writing about.
I think "Farmer Joe (Once It Was Alright)" is my favorite Laura Nyro song.
My favorite Laura album is her live one at The Bottom Line.
Wednesday, October 19, 2022. Is Wall Street hoping and pushing for
massive unemployment, what's the latest in the Hunter Biden scandals and
the stolen funds scandal in Iraq takes the spotlight off everything
else including the prime minister-designate.
Just the News further reports
that this payment took the form of a zero-interest, forgivable loan,
and though it was paid in 2017, when Joe Biden was no longer vice
president, it covered work done by his son and brother for the Chinese during his time in office.
We aren’t upset over credit; far from it. Kudos to Grassley for
drawing attention again to this deal, and Just the News for pointing out
the Bidens’ love of forgiving loans.
Yes, e-mails on Hunter’s laptop show that the Chinese paid the Biden
family at least $5 million, a fact confirmed by former business partner
Tony Bobulinski. One of the messages The Post printed back then had
another partner, James Gilliar, telling Bobulinski on May 20, 2017,
“Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I
know u know that but they are paranoid.”
Don’t remember reading that? Perhaps because when this newspaper reported it, it was during a two-week period that Twitter banned us and Facebook prevented
the sharing of our articles. And at the same time, 50 liberal former
intelligence officials declared our reporting “likely Russian
disinformation” based on no evidence — which the liberal media used as
an excuse to either ignore or insult us.
Of course the laptop was real, a fact only “confirmed” by The New
York Times, The Washington Post and others after Joe Biden was safely
elected.
THE NEW YORK POST has the right to pat
themselves on the back. The one element of the media story that I don't
think gets enough attention all this time later? THE NEW YORK TIMES'
attack on THE NEW YORK POST. They wouldn't investigate the story with
their own reporters. They did, however, publish a piece of garbage
(that we called out in real time) with baseless claims (because they
were made up by THE TIMES) of the NEW YORK POST newsroom being in an
uproar over what THE POST published. It was all make believe and
everyone pretends now that it never happened, or maybe they weren't
paying attention in real time. It had all the earmarks of the sort crap
David Corn and others pulled on Gary Webb to try to discredit Webb.
Meanwhile Senator Chuck Grassley's office released the following:
WASHINGTON – Senate
Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley is calling on the FBI to
produce specific records in its possession indicating potential criminal
activity in the Biden family’s foreign business deals. It remains unclear
whether those FBI records, which have been reviewed by Grassley’s investigative
staff, have been shared with the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of its
ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden.
“Notably,
the Justice Department and FBI have not disputed the accuracy of the
allegations that I have made public since May 31, 2022. The Justice
Department’s and FBI’s continued silence on these matters is deafening and
further erodes their credibility. Simply put, enough is enough – the Justice
Department and FBI must come clean to Congress and the American people with
respect to the steps they have taken, or failed to take, relating to the Hunter
Biden investigation,” Grassley wrote in a letter
to FBI and Justice Department leadership as well as the Delaware U.S. attorney.
In
the letter, Grassley attached a contract, signed by Hunter and James Biden and
three other business associates. The contract was part of an arrangement designed
to funnel $5 million from the Chinese communist government-connected CEFC to
Hunter and James Biden to compensate them for work done while Joe Biden was
vice president, according to an FBI interview summary of Tony Bobulinski. But
other records held by the FBI reveal frustration by the Bidens about CEFC’s
payment being delayed. Records previously
released by Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) show James and Hunter Biden
ultimately profited from a $5 million payment from a company connected to CEFC
via a separate arrangement.
Other
records held by the FBI shed light on Hunter Biden’s business and financial
relationship with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky. These documents include specific
details about conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential
criminal conduct by Hunter Biden. These documents also indicate that Joe Biden
was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in
some of them. It remains unclear whether the FBI took appropriate steps to
follow up on this information or passed it to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s
office.
Whistleblowers
Grassley
frequently hears from current and former government employees who come forward
to shine a light on fraud, waste, abuse and gross mismanagement in government
agencies or by government contractors. He protects the identities of these
sources and frequently promotes policies that shield whistleblowers from
retaliation. Individuals wishing to call attention to mismanagement or
misconduct within the Justice Department and its component agencies, such as
the FBI, about the aforementioned allegations or other misconduct should
contact Sen. Grassley’s investigations unit at (202) 224-3738 or email wb_reports@judiciary-rep.senate.gov.
Director
Wray has personally committed to Senator Grassley that whistleblowers who have
come forward will not face retaliation.
Dear
Attorney General Garland, Director Wray and U.S. Attorney Weiss:
Since
May 31, 2022, I’ve written three letters to the Justice Department and FBI
based on protected whistleblower disclosures that indicate a pattern and
practice of political decisions being made at the FBI’s Washington Field Office
(WFO) and FBI Headquarters.[1] In those letters, I’ve noted that Congress
has a constitutional responsibility to ensure that the Executive Branch
executes the law and uses taxpayer money appropriated to it in accordance with
congressional intent. In furtherance of
that constitutional responsibility, Congress has an obligation to investigate
the Executive Branch for fraud, waste, abuse and gross mismanagement – acts
which undermine faith in the American people’s governmental institutions. Those constitutional and legislative
responsibilities apply to this letter to you.
My previous letters also invited individuals, including current and
former government employees, to contact me and my office to confidentially
report allegations of fraud, waste, abuse and gross mismanagement by FBI and
Justice Department officials. In
response, my office has received a significant number of protected
communications from highly credible whistleblowers which have increased since
my initial outreach to your offices.
Based
on recent protected disclosures to my office, the FBI has within its possession
significant, impactful and voluminous evidence with respect to potential
criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and James Biden.[2]
The
evidence within the FBI’s possession that I am referencing is included,
in
part, in a summary of Tony Bobulinski’s October 23, 2020, interview with
FBI agents. In that interview, Mr. Bobulinski stated that
the arrangement Hunter Biden and James Biden created with foreign
nationals
connected to the communist Chinese government included assisting them
with
potential business deals and investments while Joe Biden was Vice
President;
however, that work remained intentionally uncompensated while Joe Biden
was Vice
President. After Joe Biden left the Vice
Presidency, the summary makes clear that Hunter Biden and James Biden
worked
with CEFC and affiliated individuals to compensate them for that past
work and
the benefits they procured for CEFC. According
to the summary, Hunter Biden, James Biden and their business associates
created
a joint venture that would serve as a vehicle to accomplish that
financial
compensation, and that arrangement was made sometime after a meeting in
Miami
between Hunter Biden and CEFC officials in February 2017. According to
the summary, that vehicle was
called SinoHawk, which was owned 50 percent by Oneida Holdings LLC
(Oneida) and
50 percent by Hudson West IV. According
to the summary, Oneida was made of five evenly divided LLCs, one for
each business
associate – including Hunter Biden and James Biden. However, according
to the
summary, 10 percent of Hunter Biden’s interest was to be held for Joe
Biden. Attached to this letter is the Oneida
Operating Agreement which lists Hunter Biden, James Biden and their
business
associates and the percentage of interest for each individual.[3]
Included below is a copy of the
signature block for the Oneida Operating Agreement which was signed on May 22,
2017.
According
to the interview summary, the money transferred to Oneida as part of the
venture to compensate the Bidens was supposed to consist of an unsecured $5
million loan, intended to be forgivable, from CEFC in 2017. Similarly, the FBI has within its possession
a different document, dated in October 2020, but referencing events that
occurred years before. That document indicates that in May 2017 – approximately
three months after the joint venture was hatched in Miami and the same month it
was officially formed – Hunter Biden yelled at CEFC officials at a meeting for
failing to fund the joint venture. That
same document notes that as of July 2017 the money still had not been
transferred and James Biden considered calling CEFC officials and threatening
to withdraw Biden family support from future deals. Notably, my September 2020 report with
Senator Johnson and our floor speeches from this year made public bank records
and financial data that showed that Hunter Biden and James Biden profited from
a $5 million wire from a company connected to CEFC in August of 2017,
indicating that it could have been the money originally intended for SinoHawk. However, based on records, that money was not
transmitted to the SinoHawk joint venture, rather it was transmitted to Hudson
West III which could partially explain SinoHawk’s eventual failure.[4] As noted in our report and our floor
speeches, the money from the wire was transferred from Hudson West III to
Hunter Biden’s firm, Owasco, and James Biden’s firm, Lion Hall Group, apparently
circumventing SinoHawk.[5]
Based
on allegations provided to my office, the information provided by Mr.
Bobulinski formed a sufficient basis to open a full field investigation on pay-to-play
grounds; however, it is unclear whether the FBI did so and whether the
information is part of the ongoing criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney
Weiss.
The
FBI also has a document within its possession that notes that then former Vice
President Joe Biden met with Hunter Biden and his business associates at a
conference in Los Angeles on May 2, 2017, and May 3, 2017. The meetings have been publicly disclosed;
however, the fact that the FBI maintains documents referencing these data
points has not been made public before.
Lastly,
the FBI has within its possession a series of documents relating to information
on Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and his business and financial associations
with Hunter Biden. The documents in the
FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by
non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter
Biden. These documents also indicate
that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have
been involved in some of them. Based on
allegations, it is unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative
procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down
investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of
the 2020 election, just as it did with Hunter Biden information that I wrote to
you about on July 25, 2022.[6] It is also unclear whether U.S. Attorney
Weiss has performed his own due diligence on these and related allegations.
These
new whistleblower disclosures beg the question: in light of the allegations
that I have brought to your attention, what have the FBI and Justice
Department, to include U.S. Attorney Weiss, done to investigate?
Notably,
the Justice Department and FBI have not disputed the accuracy of the
allegations that I have made public since May 31, 2022. The Justice Department’s and FBI’s continued
silence on these matters is deafening and further erodes their credibility. Simply put, enough is enough – the Justice
Department and FBI must come clean to Congress and the American people with
respect to the steps they have taken, or failed to take, relating to the Hunter
Biden investigation. With respect to the
new – and numerous – legally protected disclosures that have been made to my
office, please provide the following no later than October 27, 2022, so that
Congress can perform an independent and objective review:
1.
The
full and unredacted FBI summary of Tony Bobulinski’s October 23, 2020,
interview.
2.
Was
Tony Bobulinski’s interview summary placed within Guardian? Was it placed within an investigative case
file?
3.
The
full and unredacted October 2020 document that lists a timeline of events associated
with Hunter Biden’s business associates, foreign and domestic.
4.
All
records relating to the May 2, 2017, and May 3, 2017, meetings between Tony
Bobulinski and Joe Biden.
5.
All
records,[7]
including FD-71, FD-209a, FD-302, FD-794b, FD-1023, FD-1040a, FD-1057 and
Guardian leads, from January 1, 2014 to the date of this letter that reference
Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden and Joe Biden.
Thank
you for your attention to this important matter.
[7] “Records” include any written, recorded, or
graphic material of any kind, including letters, memoranda, reports,
notes,
electronic data (e-mails, email attachments, and any other
electronically-created or stored information),
calendar
entries, inter-office communications, meeting minutes, phone/voice mail or
recordings/records of verbal
communications,
and drafts (whether or not they resulted in final documents). This definition applies to all requests for
records in the questions for the record.
An event took place yesterday which encapsulates the essential class
dynamic at work in the deepening crisis of the global capitalist economy
as inflation surges to its highest levels in four decades, interest
rate hikes by the US Fed and other central banks continue, and the
danger of world recession looms ever larger.
Following a Bloomberg
report that a US recession is virtually certain in the next twelve
months, according to its economic model projections, stocks on Wall
Street surged for the second day in a row after taking a battering in
the recent period.
The financial speculators are salivating at the
prospect of a recession, knowing full well that the Fed’s policies are
aimed not at curbing corporate price gouging and bumper profits, but at
slashing workers’ wages.
The class content of the so-called “fight against inflation,” which
is the mantra of the Fed and other central banks, was spelled out by
former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn.
“We’re going to have to
see job destruction if we’re really going to see inflation be
curtailed,” he said in an interview with Yahoo Finance on Monday.
Cohn
let the cat out of the bag so far as the “fight against inflation” is
concerned, making clear it has nothing to do with the price hikes
ripping apart living standards and that its central focus is only on one
price: that of labour power, wages.
“We now have a smaller labour
force population in the United States so businesses are having to pay
workers more to attract them into the labour force which is
inflationary. Wages go up and so this is inflationary,” he said.
This claim is a total falsification. As every economic report indicates, including the World Economic Outlook
issued by the International Monetary Fund last week, wages have not
kept pace with inflation, either in the US or the rest of the world.
The
inflationary spiral is the outcome of the actions of the capitalist
ruling classes. The refusal of governments around the world to undertake
public health safety measures to eliminate COVID-19 from the human
population, lest they adversely impacted on the stock market, set off
the supply chain crisis.
The
price hikes have been exacerbated by the US-NATO war against Russia in
the Ukraine, the major increases in military spending by all governments
and the speculative bubble created by the flow of ultra-cheap money
into the financial system over the past decade and a half.
On top
of this, there is rampant profit gouging by the food and energy giants
and speculation by hedge funds and others in food, metals, energy and
other basic commodities as the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) made clear in a report issued earlier this month.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the big scandal continues to be the theft of money.
An investigation by Iraq’s finance ministry discovered
Sunday that US$2.5 billion dollars were stolen from a government tax
commission account by five companies, in what amounts to one of the
largest corruption scandals in the country’s history.
All together, taxpayer revenue totaling 3.7 trillion Iraqi dinars was
embezzled from a government account at Baghdad’s Rafidain Bank—a
state-owned bank and the largest in Iraq—between September 2021 and
August 2022.
During this time, 247 cheques were cashed by five companies, three of which were formed just over a month before the scheme began, reported Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi political analyst.
The account’s intended purpose was to hold funds for “companies who held contracts with the public sector, to be repaid once projects are completed,” Jiyad explained.
“These amounts have been stolen by the companies through the cheques
issued by the General Commission of Taxes instead of going to the real
beneficiaries,” the internal probe concluded.
An Iraqi investigative judge has questioned five senior tax officials
over $2.5 billion in public funds that have gone missing, and more
arrest warrants have been issued, authorities said on Tuesday.
An internal probe by the Finance Ministry in oil-rich Iraq has found
that the money was withdrawn from the tax authority’s account at
state-owned Rafidain Bank, the state news agency INA reported on
Saturday.
Local media published a tax authority document showing the funds were
withdrawn between September 2021 and August this year, transferred to
the accounts of five companies using 247 checks, and then immediately
withdrawn.
The Baghdad judge summoned five tax office officials, including the
director-general, his deputy and a supervisor at the finance and control
department, the supreme judicial council said in a statement Tuesday.
This
scandal emerged days after Mohammed shia al-Sudani had been named prime
miniser-designate and tasked with forming a government in 30 days.
