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DODGE-IS IN THE CONSTITUTION, CRAZY ELIZABETH WARREN WANTS TO KEEP TAXPAYERS FROM KNOWING WHAT GOVERNMENT SPENDS!

DOGE Is in the Constitution

On January 30, Pocahontas shouted into a microphone that “There is nothing in the Constitution that says ordinary citizens have a right to see what we spend our tax dollars on.” Aside from the frightening implications of such a statement, Senator Warren is so far off base that she’s not even on the field. As an attorney, she should know better.

Article I, § 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution says:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

Questioning Grok AI yields an answer that the highest broad brush level of disclosure, limited to gross receipts and Department level funding, satisfies this provision. This may have been adequate at the Founding, but with the proliferation of departments, bureaus, and agencies, it is no longer a “Statement [of]… Expenditures of all public Money.” A proper description of the present state of affairs is, frankly, NSFW.

Enter DOGE.

Using computerized tools that operate many multiples of the speed of any human, DOGE has been able to create forensic maps of where all the money has gone. In short, it’s an automated method of observing Sutton’s Law: Follow the Money.

Like most working stiffs, I thought USAID was a way that “aid” money got to foreign governments and organizations. Boy was I wrong! Yes, the “AID” part was “Agency for International Development,” but that didn’t seem to make much difference. Big Balls Coristine and his band of merry men let the cat out of the bag. Large chunks of that money were being laundered into the pockets of Democrat organizations and operatives.

Politico has been widely reported to be a prime recipient of federal dollars. While the details are unclear, the $8.2 million in cancelled government subscriptions is a not-inconsequential hit to its $100 million total budget. Other left wing entities such as ActBlue, the Tides Foundation, and various Soros affiliates are also implicated in misappropriated funds.

Detailed amounts for specific beneficiaries aren’t known yet, since DOGE hasn’t published its reports. Multiple lawsuits are throwing mud in the gears. But the screaming by leftists cannot be ignored. They are being exposed. There can be no doubt that government corruption has financed many things that will almost certainly result in personal address changes and loss of WiFi privileges. But more important is the fact that, when all is said and done, a major portion of the federal fisc isn’t being spent on those things that the Constitution allows.

One has to wonder, with all this money sloshing around the pool, just how much of it has ended up in the play pens of various Democrat legislators? How is it that Chuckie Schumer has become a multimillionaire on a salary of a couple hundred grand? Or how did our favorite New York bartender get to be worth millions? It couldn’t be her economics degree or a trade in cattle futures, could it?

The real problem here is the word “expenditures.” When Congress appropriates a few paltry billions for USAID, it hasn’t spent a dime. It has authorized the president to spend through USAID. The money that USAID sends out are its expenditures, and those are the largest part of what was appropriated. Keeping the lights on and paying the help are small potatoes. The federal government hasn’t told us very much about where it is actually sending the money. For example, when we ship rockets and bombs to Ukraine, that’s not technically an expenditure. They are pulled from stockpiles and loaded on ships. The actual expenditure is to Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, or some other defense contractor. And that information is buried under multiple layers of paper.

The Constitution obligates the Feds to tell us where the money went. Those expenditures have been concealed from us for decades. It is very likely that most of the last century has been devoted to creating these money laundering networks with the goal of financing every “election” campaign with taxpayer money. In close races, it probably paid for stuffing ballot boxes (see “2,000 Mules”). It definitely paid for propaganda via outlets such as Politico and the Huffington Post. Big Tech got richer from toeing the Left’s line. And Democrat campaigns harvested this laundered money through ActBlue, where retirees on small fixed incomes “gave” massive amounts via thousands of tiny donations. When contacted, the “donors” pointed out that not only did they not give the money, they didn’t have it to give. There’s a short word that describes this: fraud.

Senator Warren isn’t just wrong on the Constitution. She has taken a position completely opposed to the exact requirement spelled out in it. We have every right to know what our government spends our money on. Because no agency of the Executive Branch willingly gives up its ledger, DOGE is the essential crowbar to break open the stone wall. Thus we may properly understand that DOGE is the reporting agency envisioned by Article I, § 9, Clause 7.

Further affiant sayeth naught.

EUROPEAN LEFTIST POLICIES ARE DESTROYING COUNTRIES!

Greek MEP Delivers Scathing Rebuke of EU’s Socialist Failures in Parliament (Video)

Greek MEP Afroditi Latinopoulou gave a powerful speech in the European Parliament this week, calling out the EU’s failed socialist policies and the double standards of the left-wing governments that have been running Europe for decades.

The Real Threat to Europe? Socialist Policies

Latinopoulou from the “Voice of Reason” party didn’t hold back, flipping the script on the establishment’s claim that conservatives are the real threat to Europe’s stability.

“Did the right destroy industry? Did the right put Greta Thunberg on a pedestal? Did the right push green energy at the expense of industry?” she asked. “Or was it the socialist governments that have governed the European Union for the past 50 years?”

She pointed out that major nations like France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Greece have been economically gutted by leftist policies. Sky-high taxes, endless regulations, and reckless green energy schemes have crippled competitiveness and pushed industries out of Europe.

Courageous Stand Against EU Hypocrisy

Latinopoulou spoke bluntly, calling out the arrogance of European leftists who now attempt to shift blame onto conservatives.

“You, the destroyers of Europe, have the audacity to point the finger at us and claim that we conservatives are a threat to Europe?” she said.

The Thatcher Quote That Left Parliament Silent

At a striking moment in her speech, she quoted Margaret Thatcher: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” The brutal truth hung in the air.

Then, she laid out her demands:

Cut taxes
Increase competitiveness
Bring back plastic straws
Stop attacking brown coal
Invest in industry
Most importantly, admit that socialist policies have failed

A Rallying Cry for Europe’s Future

Latinopoulou’s speech has gone viral, striking a chord with Europeans tired of bureaucratic overreach and economic destruction. Her defiance signals a growing conservative pushback against the EU’s failing socialist agenda.

The European Parliament may not like what she said, but the message was clear: the left has run Europe into the ground, and it’s time for a course correction.

BIGGEST FRAUD IN HISTORY…SOCIAL SECURITY PAYING OUT TO 394 MILLION PEOPLE!!!! more than the entire population!

A cursory review of Social Security records by Musk’s department has revealed that the social security safety net program is paying benefits to 150-year-olds. The businessman noted that many of those entries listed for Social Security recipients had no identifying information.

“This might be the biggest fraud in history,” Musk stated, according to a report by RT.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, the United States-based billionaire noted that “there are far more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA.” Musk also shared a post by an X user suggesting that 394,943,364 people are currently receiving social security payments. That is more than the total U.S. population, which amounts to 334 million.

REUTERS RIDING ON $ 1 BILLION in USA TAXPAYER MONEY!!!!

Gov’t Data: Reuters Collected More Than $1B From Taxpayers in 15 Years

AP Images

The Associated Press (AP), The New York Times, and other far-left, mainstream media outlets have collected millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars from multiple government agencies.

But a search of USASpending.gov reveals that Reuters News & Media has collected more than $1 billion through the years.

Yet another contract to Thomson Reuters Special Services, an affiliate under the Thomson empire, is also under scrutiny. It came from the Defense Department (DoD) to combat cyberattacks, although the wording of the contract led Elon Musk, chieftain of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to mischaracterize it on X.

Reuters Gets Rich on Taxpayers’ Dime

The federal government’s out-of-control spending has been the focus of DOGE since President Donald Trump created it by executive order on Inauguration Day.

Since Trump took office, more and more evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse has surfaced on social media, much of it from USAspending.gov. Although the scandalous data have always been available, only when Musk began looking into spending did the material go viral.

As The New American reported last week, AP and the Times have raked in millions of taxpayer dollars, as has the hate-Trump Politico. The total for the three is upwards of $100 million.

But Reuters has been an especially favored beneficiary of taxpayer money. Of course, 99 percent of taxpayers knew it.

The spending website shows that Reuters News & Media Inc. has pocketed $1.2 billion since 2008 from numerous agencies, including the departments of Justice, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services.

It also pulled in big bucks from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Another Reuters affiliate, Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC, has snared $120 million since 2010.

Musk’s DoD Post

Also going viral thanks to Musk is the Thomson Reuters Special Services contract with the Department of Defense.

Musk retweeted a post about the contract that claimed DoD had paid Reuters — meaning the media outlet — for “social engineering” and “large scale social deception.”

“I can’t believe how good this timeline is!” Topher Field wrote:

Follow this chain of events:

1. Reuters writes hit piece against DOGE.

2. Musk tweets, ‘I wonder what Reuters are being paid?

3. DOGE uncovers Department of Defence contract paying Reuters for ‘Large Scale Social Deception.

It’s crazy that this is happening.

It’s INSANE that it’s playing out in the public square!

CALIFORNIA GASOLINE COSTS WILL SPIKE DUE TO STUPID RULES!

California is One Refinery Closure Away From an Economic Collapse

“No pipelines exist to feed gasoline in from other states.”

If you thought that the LA wildfires exposed just how mismanaged California is, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Russia. China. Venezuela. Iran. More than a dozen countries make gasoline at state-owned refineries.

Could California be next on the list?

Let’s see what do all of those places have in common? Tyrannical regimes. Miserable lives for much of the population. High levels of migration. Radical politics. Sure, California belongs on that list.

California policymakers are considering state ownership of one or more oil refineries, one item on a list of options presented by the California Energy Commission to ensure steady gas supplies as oil companies pull back from the refinery business in the state.

Have a state that hates oil and couldn’t make money selling drugs (literally) run oil refineries. What could go wrong?

Already, two California refineries have ceased producing gasoline to make biodiesel fuel for use in heavy-duty trucks, a cleaner-fuel alternative that enjoys rich state subsidies. More worrisome, the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Wilmington, just outside Los Angeles, plans to close down permanently by year’s end.

That leaves eight major refineries in California capable of producing gasoline. The closure of any one would create serious gasoline supply issues, industry analysts say. But both Chevron and Valero are contemplating permanent refinery closures…

California is known as a “gasoline island” lacking the kind of multistate logistics network through most of the continental U.S. that can help alleviate supply shocks. No pipelines exist to feed gasoline in from other states. Ocean shipments from the refinery-rich Gulf States are restricted by an antiquated federal law known as the Jones Act…

Further complicating matters: the special blends of gasoline required in California. Those required formulations have gone a long way toward reducing air pollution. But they also drive up gasoline prices and raise the risk of shortages, because little such gasoline is produced outside California.

Insurance companies are fleeing California. Refineries are fleeing California. Californians are fleeing California. But there’s enough people in the state that a major energy crisis is entirely plausible.

It’s not hard to find $6 a gallon gas in the state, but that could just be the beginning.

And the Democrat super-majority has lots of plans for getting all the remaining refineries to flee California.

The options list is disparate: Ship in more gasoline from Asia; regulate refineries on the order of electric utilities; cap profit margins; and many more.

The list was due to be transformed into a formal transition plan by Dec. 31, 2024, but six weeks later no plan has been issued. Therefore, it’s not yet clear what the state response will be if another refinery announces a shutdown this year or next.

Tell everyone to buy Teslas. Take over the refineries. It worked so well in Venezuela that what used to be a petro-power can’t even run refineries. But that’s okay. California will hire only transgender ex-cons of color, tax the product as much as possible and then blame the subsequent disaster on global warming.

USAAID IS TOTAL LEFTIST FRAUD ALL OVER THE WORLD

USAID’s Indefensible Ties to the Woke Nonprofits That Called the Shots in the Biden Regime

(Daily Signal)—The U.S. Agency for International Development wasn’t just spending your hard-earned tax dollars on transgender operas overseas—USAID also has troubling connections with the leftist pressure groups that infiltrated and advised the Biden administration.

The book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes the woke activist groups that fed staff into the administrative state and pushed woke policies on the bureaucracy.

As President Donald Trump released information about USAID’s corruption, I started to notice a few familiar names from my research.

The American people should understand just how connected the woke enterprise is to the federal bureaucracy, and USAID provides a powerful example of those ties.

What Is USAID?

While the acronym suggests USAID is about aid, it’s really about soft power. President John F. Kennedy established USAID as a tool to fight Soviet Communism abroad, but in recent years, the agency has promoted the classic woke causes: critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against blacks and favors whites and requires fundamental reform), climate alarmism, gender ideology, and a preference for technocratic government.

The Trump administration has highlighted USAID waste, particularly $1.5 million to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in Serbia’s workplaces; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia; and more. Others have highlighted grants such as $20 million for an Arabic translation of Sesame Street and $2 million for promoting sex changes in Guatemala.

USAID has also spent $250 million on a Climate Finance for Development Accelerator, aiming to “mobilize $2.5 billion in public and private climate investments by 2030.” The accelerator seeks to help countries meet their commitments in the Paris Climate Agreement, which the Trump administration rejected on the president’s first day in office.

These initiatives echo the spending of Hungarian American billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and that is no accident.

The Soros Connection

The Open Society Foundations has bankrolled many of the leftist groups in the Woketopus, which staffed and advised the Biden administration.

While Open Society Foundations has claimed that it does not receive funding from USAID or direct the funding of USAID, its ties to USAID are undeniable. Not only has Open Society funded the same projects as USAID, but its leaders met with former USAID Administrator Samantha Power at least twice, the Soros foundations network listed USAID among its “donor partners” in 2001, and an Open Society nonprofit actually sued USAID twice, with the cases reaching the Supreme Court both times.

USAID and Open Society Foundations jointly funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project—an organization that attacked conservatives for criticizing Soros and that published the report that sparked the first Trump impeachment. USAID’s connections to the project raise uncomfortable questions about whether the agency was trying to oust Trump.

The Organized Crime Corruption and Reporting Project also attacked Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.; Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah; and Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. These conservatives made the mistake of noticing that the U.S. Embassy to Macedonia had selected Soros’ Open Society Foundations as the main implementer for USAID projects in the Eastern European country.

According to Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., USAID awarded a $2.54 million contract to Open Society for training in “civic activism,” “mobilization,” and “civic engagement” in Macedonia in February 2017.

The East West Management Institute—which has long listed Open Society Foundations as a donor and implementing partner and which received $31.2 million from USAID in the last full fiscal year ending on Sept. 30—launched court changes in Albania that critics allege resulted in the prosecution of Albanian opposition leader Sali Berisha, silencing the opponent of the country’s socialist prime minister.

As for its role in the Woketopus, Open Society Foundations or its partners, the Open Society Policy Center, the Open Society Institute, or the Foundation to Promote Open Society have funded:

the American Civil Liberties Union (which pushed open borders in the Biden administration)
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center (which pushed the weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against conservatives)
the Human Rights Campaign (which pushed gender ideology)
the Sierra Club (which pushed climate alarmism)

USAID has awarded more than $27 million in grants to the Tides Center, which forms part of the Left’s dark money network I expose in “The Woketopus” along with its sister groups the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy.

USAID awarded the Tides Center four grants: a $24.7 million grant in 2016, of which $20 million has been spent; a $1.5 million grant in 2016, of which $147,000 has been spent; a $700,000 grant in 2014 that appears not to have been fulfilled; and another $150,000 grant that appears not to have been fulfilled.

The largest grants came from USAID’s Foreign Assistance Program, which “works to support long-term and equitable economic growth and advance U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting economic growth, agriculture, and trade; global health; and democracy, conflict prevention, and humanitarian assistance.”

Tides, like Open Society, has funded many of the leftist groups that called the shots under Biden. The Tides Foundation, Tides Advocacy, or the Tides Center have funded:

the Center for American Progress (which fed more than 60 officials into the Biden administration, pushing both open borders and climate funding)
the Natural Resources Defense Fund and the Sierra Club (which pushed a crackdown on oil and gas)
the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
the ACLU

The Tides Center launched an organization, Palestine Legal, that represents anti-Israel rioters in court and gives them legal advice. A Palestine Legal senior attorney told a leftist magazine in January that the group has “represented or advised hundreds of students” since Oct. 7, 2023.

A Revolving Door

Former USAID staff have gone to work at groups in the Woketopus.

Olivia Callahan, for example, served as a law clerk at USAID before taking roles at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Ann Van Dusen, who spent 25 years at USAID, now serves as a senior associate at Arabella Advisors, a for-profit company that launched nonprofit entities that funnel money to the Woketopus.

Anne-Marea (Tangee) Griffin, who worked for one year at USAID, now works as a senior fellow for Africa at the Center for American Progress.

Miriam Rashid, an associate director of racial equity and justice at the Center for American Progress, worked as a graduate research fellow at USAID.

Brandon Hooks, deputy director of creator and partnership strategy at the Human Rights Campaign, served as an LGBTI office intern at USAID.

Jay Gilliam, who served as an LGBTQI+ coordinator at USAID until January, previously worked as director of global programs at the Human Rights Campaign. Before joining HRC, he spent four years at USAID.

Chika Nwankwo, who worked as a research assistant for USAID, now works on vaccines via a contract with New Venture Fund, one of the Arabella Advisors-established nonprofits. New Venture Fund sponsored Governing for Impact, a shadowy nonprofit that enjoyed tremendous access in the early Biden administration.

Cuthbert Tinavapi, who served as a USAID regional auditor, now works with the Open Society Foundations as a finance consultant.

Tinatin Tsertsvadze, an advocacy adviser at Open Society Foundations, previously worked as a USAID assistant in the nation of Georgia.

Beth Dunlap, a director at the Open Society Foundations, served as a “senior transition adviser” at USAID. In this role, she “provided strategic guidance, facilitation, and operational support to programs funding political transition in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,” according to her LinkedIn profile. Her profile lists countries served: Myanmar, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, and North Macedonia.

Andrea Guardo, a former “human rights specialist” at USAID, now works in Democracy Protection for Latin American and the Caribbean at the Open Society Foundations.

Diego Garcia Devis, drug policy team manager at the Open Society Foundations, previously worked at USAID for nearly five years.

Rajiv J. Shah, president at the Rockefeller Foundation, part of the Left’s dark money network that funded climate activist groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, previously headed USAID under President Barack Obama.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s chief of staff, Mike Muldoon, and its vice president for innovation, Andrew Sweet, also had elevated roles at USAID—as senior investment officer and senior adviser to the administrator, respectively.

Over the past four years, USAID has given more than $4.2 billion in grants to “miscellaneous foreign awardees,” which—as the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer explained—is code for “we don’t want to say who got the money.”

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to hide some of this money—perhaps USAID wants to withhold the identity of recipients in order to protect them from terrorist cells or foreign adversaries. Yet the idea that any federal agency would direct $4.2 billion of taxpayers’ money without disclosing the recipients is shocking.

It also raises the question of whether that money is supporting the woke activist groups that enjoy close ties to USAID.

A Snapshot of the Left’s Woke Bureaucracy

USAID’s connections to the Open Society Foundations, Tides, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU, and Arabella Advisors confirm the basic premise of “The Woketopus:” that the Left’s massive dark money influence campaign has immense power, regardless of who’s in the White House.

USAID provides a snapshot of the Left’s massive infrastructure, and combating its influence is no easy feat.

WIND FARMS CAUSE TERRIBLE DAMAGE TO WILDLIFE AND NECESSARY INSECTS

The Devastating Ecological Carnage Wrought by Wind Turbines

Onshore wind turbines are causing heavy ecological carnage, with increasing concern focused on the removal of a vast tonnage of insect life. For obvious political, Net Zero reasons, insect decimation is not a well-funded research area, but work in Germany in 2016 put the loss across the country at 1,200 tonnes a year. Recently, the Heartland Institute extrapolated the individual annual insect loss worldwide at 13,640,000,000,000 (13.64 quadrillion) insects, and of course it can be noted that the figures are nearly a decade out of date. Other scientific work has reported that flying insects destroyed include bees, flying beetles and butterflies. Curiously, the many institutions apparently concerned with wildlife stay silent on the slaughter. For its part, the UK Natural History Museum (NHM) offers a Build Your Own Wind Turbine kit. Fun for all the family and if the kiddies are lucky they might get to whack a passing fly or a couple of moths.

The German work estimated insect losses at 40 million per turbine during the plant-growing season. Commenting on the findings, the mathematician and evolutionary ecologist Professor Christian Voigt felt it was necessary to evaluate if these fatalities added to the decline of insect populations, “and potentially the extinction of species”. In a 2022 paper, Voigt reported that turbines can change the nearby microclimate, while vibrational noise may reduce earthworm abundance with likely cascading effects on soil quality and vegetation. In addition, he noted findings that wind turbine facilities led to displacement of nesting and wintering birds.

Recent work from researchers at the University of Wyoming suggests that moths, butterflies, beetles, flies and true bugs may be the most vulnerable to the giant revolving blades. Wind turbines create vortices, sucking in wildlife and causing problems for both bats and large birds such as eagles. “The vast amount of avian and insect deaths at the hands of wind turbines is disastrous in and of itself, from a conservation and ecological standpoint,” states Heartland.

Insect loss and extinctions are of course very popular in the Net Zero fear-mongering business. In 2022, the NHM ran with an improbable tale that flying insects in the UK had declined by 60% in just 20 years. Too good of course for national treasure Sir David Attenborough to pass up and he repeated the scare during his BBC Wild Isles series, a green agitprop co-production with the World Wildlife Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The evidence proved to be anecdotal and mostly arose from ‘citizen scientists’ counting bugs on car number plates. Missing from the research was a note that vehicle registrations have tripled in the UK since 1970, while cars have largely changed shape from angular boxes to aerodynamic wedges that sweep insects out of the way.

Despite these obvious flaws in the story, the NHM claimed the astonishing loss was caused by rising temperatures and fragmented habitats. The tiny temperature rises over the last 20 years are hardly likely to affect insects that much, while slightly longer growing seasons in the northern hemisphere and a recent 14% ‘greening’ of the Earth due to higher levels of carbon dioxide are almost certain to have been extremely beneficial.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the conservation of wildlife is little more than an after-thought when it comes to pushing the Net Zero fantasy world of unreliable, expensive renewable energy. Almost invariably those crying loudest about insect decline are those pushing hardest for green energy boondoggles such as wind turbines. Yet it is known that turbines attract insects with their colour, lights and ambient heat. More attracted insects lead to more bats and birds which lead to more avian casualties, which lead to more ground animals scavenging, which in turn attracts larger raptors that cannot escape the turbine-generated wind currents. And so the 150 mph revolving skyscraper-high blades set up their own circular killing fields.

The loss of insects is particularly disastrous since they are decomposers, crop pollinators and a crucial basis of the entire food chain. In April 2023, the Royal Entomological Society welcomed the opportunity to respond to a UK Government department on the issue of insect decline and food security. There was plenty to say on climate change of course and some interesting observations on the boom-and-bust nature of insect populations, but not a peep on the dead, wide areas of countryside created by wind turbines.

It might not worry the establishment insect brigade but the colliding critters can be a big problem for turbine operators. Professor Voigt noted that insect remains collected during low wind periods disrupt airflow and can halve power generation during high wind periods. These days cleaning this muck off turbine blades is big business. Based in Glasgow, Balmore Wind Services offers a specialist rope access service for the difficult biomatter cleaning required by insects and bird fouling. One thing is certain, concludes Heartland: “Wind turbines undoubtedly cause massive avian and insect deaths on a yearly basis.”

With all the learned societies and institutions continuing to turn a blind eye, it is hard to see who will step forward to draw attention to this developing ecological disaster. Who will be the first to suggest that the proper place for a windmill is in a museum?

OBAMA’S MARXIST LEGACY KILLED GM…

How Socialism Works in America: Remembering Obama’s GM Boondoggle

In 2009, the Obama administration bailed out General Motors (GM) with American taxpayer dollars, prompting Venezuela’s socialist dictator Hugo Chavez to quip, “Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel [Castro], careful or we are going to end up to his right.”

The mainstream media buried this unflattering story to the best of their ability.

What they did report breathlessly, however, was Obama’s assurance that he had “no interest” in nationalizing or “running GM.”

This was an example of media gaslighting the public before we began calling it that. Many Americans knew what we were witnessing back then as well as Hugo Chavez, and that it was thinly-veiled socialism in action.

Obama was unquestionably lying about his government not having an interest in the production and sales directives of GM, and more on this in a moment. But he was certainly uninterested in any of the company’s previous shareholders’ financial interest in GM.

Unfortunately for those shareholders who owned millions of outstanding shares of GM before this government takeovover, “restructuring,” all the nearly-worthless common and preferred stock was made immediately and totally worthless, and new GM stock was issued and largely purchased by the government with taxpayer dollars.

It was known as the “New GM,” or as critics called it, “Government Motors.” Washington would own roughly 60-percent of this new government-funded automobile startup, Canada would own another 11 percent, and, adding insult to injury for stockholders, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union would own nearly 20 percent of the new company.

This would be the same UAW that was arguably the greatest driver of the conditions leading to GM’s bankruptcy, which, in conjunction with the corrupt Democrat party machine in Detroit and Washington, negotiated insanely impractical wage, benefit, and pension contracts that crushed GM’s ability to be competitive against its non-unionized competition.

According to Elon Musk, who knows a thing or two about the auto industry, the UAW “drove GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and lost 200,000 jobs for people they were supposed to protect … UAW destroyed the once-great US auto industry & everyone knows it.” [sic]

One of the most notorious of the UAW’s requirements for employers like GM was the necessity of a “jobs bank,” where the company is required to pay laid-off workers nearly full wages to do nothing at all.

One would be hard pressed to find a better analogy to portray the relationship between the professed ideas of socialist central planners and the real-world outcomes of those ideas.

The idea was that the government requiring a company to pay former workers nearly full pay for doing nothing at all would reduce the number of layoffs. In reality, such price controls and government regulation reduced efficiency and created an unquestionable loss of integrity in a free-market-driven business model that necessitates – you guessed it – increased government intervention to “save” it.

That’s how then-Vice President Joe Biden often characterized what happened to GM in the 2012 presidential campaign, anyway. Crediting his boss, he routinely said, “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

But what did the government actually do with the GM bailout, besides make a multi-billion-dollar terrible investment on taxpayers’ behalf to get a political win and a campaign slogan for Democrats?

Obama may not have ever run Government Motors by crunching the numbers or helping to drive productivity. But he did hire Brian Deese, an almost-grad from Yale Law who had “never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the auto industry,” says the New York Times.

Most would recognize that putting an almost-lawyer in charge of a car manufacturing company is an idea so stupid that it could only be the result of government involvement. I’m reminded of the scene in the HBO series Chernobyl, where a nuclear physicist investigating the cause of the reactor explosion reminds a skeptical Soviet apparatchik that before he was the Deputy Secretary of Belarus, his real-world experience lay in working at a shoe factory.

“To the workers of the world,” he mirthfully says as he raises a small glass of vodka, after reminding her that everything’s fine, and that he’s the one in charge.

But Obama also assured the American people that the federal government wouldn’t be asserting its majority shareholder rights over the “New GM,” except in “the most fundamental of corporate decisions.” He certainly seemed to have interests about the types of products that GM would make in the future, though.

Just prior to nationaliz… I mean, “restructuring” GM, he told the press at the signing of a Presidential Memorandum on Fuel Efficiency Standards, that “over the next five years, we expect fuel efficiency standards in cars and light trucks to reach an average of 35.5 miles per gallon.” He would use the government to “have a single standard in place,” which would create a “clear incentive to develop more efficient vehicles.”

Only 11 cars manufactured at that time met that standard, and yet on that day, he signed a memorandum directing the EPA’s Lisa Jackson to invent new fuel efficiency standards for medium- and heavy-duty trucks along with the previously-prescribed government standards for cars and light trucks.

That certainly doesn’t sound like someone who was only interested in the “most fundamental of corporate decisions” to make GM a profitable company. It sounds very much like someone with a political agenda to force production and distribution of a very specific product that the American public didn’t want, and who was interested in using the power of the federal government as a cudgel to force a desired political outcome, absent the consent of either producers or consumers.

In the end, shareholders of an estimated 556 million outstanding shares of GM stock lost all their investment in an iconic American company that, in 2007, had a share price of above $40 and a market capitalization of over $22 billion. Bad for shareholders of GM.

Then, after Democratic politicians at both the federal and local levels, in conjunction with corrupt union leadership, had thoroughly gutted the company by making it as inefficient and uncompetitive as possible via price controls and various other protectionist schemes, the United States Treasury swooped in and cancelled all shares held by previous investors, and swiftly invested roughly $50 billion in taxpayer money (previously allocated TARP money, along with substantial debt) to fundamentally transform the industry into what the Obama and his apparatchiks imagined the automobile company of the future should be.

The end result? Officially, the Treasury reports that the investment was a $11.2 billion loss for American taxpayers. Bad for all of us, I guess.

But it worked out well for GM workers, right?

Not exactly. The number of GM factory workers was reduced from 90K to roughly 69K, and production facilities reduced from 47 to 31. In addition, the labor union signed new employment contracts, lowering management wages by nearly half, from $78 to $45 (those are hourly wages, 15 years ago, mind you), bringing these labor costs into alignment with other U.S. based, non-union auto manufacturing plants, like Toyota, Edwin Feulner at the Heritage Foundation writes.

This brings us to the most vital point of all. Toyota exists as free-market competition to GM, and its priority is to be competitive in the marketplace. Toyota manufactures and distributes much of its product in the United States, and it should be noted that it did not require a federal bailout of $50B in taxpayer capital to remain on life support as it downsized its workforce and production as GM did. And taxpayers didn’t suffer an $11.2B loss as a result of Toyota’s business practices, either.

In 1975, market capitalization for Toyota was $5.1 billion. GM’s market capitalization was more than twice that amount.

By 1985, Toyota had overtaken GM by roughly $3 billion, with nearly $15.5 billion in market capitalization.

On May 29, 2009, GM was trading at $0.75. This was the final day of trading before declaring bankruptcy and being appropria… ahem, “restructured” by the federal government. Toyota, on that same day, was trading at over $45 a share with a market capitalization of over $70 billion.

Today, Toyota directly employs 136K Americans. It is in our country’s best interest that business-minded people at Toyota have more power in the auto industry than Barack Obama and the corrupt UAW.

To be clear, this is not about Toyota, and this is certainly not a criticism of GM’s current management or its current employees. This is simply a matter of history and practical observation about appropriate incentives in a free market.

We should be creating incentives to make it attractive for domestic and foreign investors companies to produce and sell products in America, and to employ Americans as our collective success is cultivated. And while I’m not crazy about Trump’s insistence that tariffs are some sort of magical economic panacea, Donald Trump does, at least, seem to understand this instinctively and conveys the message well.

“My message to every business in the world is very simple,” he says. “Come make your product in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth.”

That, at least, is a very welcome signal for America’s future when compared to his predecessor, Comrade Obama.

CRUISE SHiPS ARE A BIG PROFIT CENTER!

The Economics of Cruise Ships

For decades, the industry has done everything in its power to avoid paying into the system.

TCruise ships are often called “monsters” of the sea.

If you’ve ever seen one in action, you’ll understand why: A vessel like Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas is longer than 12 blue whales. At 228k gross tons, it is 5x the size of the once-formidable Titanic. It can hold 6,680 passengers and 2,200 crewmembers, the population of a small American town.

In 2018, 28.5m passengers — the bulk of them from America — spent more than $46B on cruises globally. The biggest players see annual profits in the billions.

But cruise companies have done more to earn the “monster” moniker than churning out huge ships and market gains.

For decades, these companies have utilized century-old loopholes to avoid paying corporate taxes. They’ve gone to great lengths to bypass US employment laws, hiring foreign workers for less than $2/hour. They’ve sheltered themselves as foreign entities while simultaneously benefitting from US taxpayer-funded agencies and resources.

Now, in the wake of a coronavirus crisis that sunk cruise stocks by double digits, these companies are lobbying for federal assistance.

To better understand the dynamics of this wild industry, we spoke with maritime lawyers, legislators, and cruise experts in 3 countries.

The cruise industry at large

Before we get into how cruise companies circumvent US taxes and regulations, let’s take a quick look at the major players, the money they make, and how they make it.

The global market comprises dozens of cruise lines and more than 250 ships. But 3 players — Carnival Corporation & PLC, Royal Caribbean Cruises LTD, and Norweigan Cruise Line HLD — control roughly 75% of the market.

These companies, which preside over an empire of subsidiary cruise lines, collectively raked in $34.2B in revenue in 2018.

Cruise ships make this money through two channels: Ticket sales and onboard purchases (e.g., alcoholic drinks, casino gambling, spa treatments, art auctions, and shore excursions), which passengers pay for with pre-loaded cruise cards and chip-equipped wristbands.

On average, tickets account for 62% of total revenue and onboard purchases make up the remaining 38%.

Though tickets represent a majority of revenue, onboard purchases account for the lion’s share of the profit, according to several experts.

As a high fixed-cost business, a cruise ship relies on getting as many passengers as possible on the ship — even at fire-sale rates. The major cruise lines will often fill each ship to 105%-110% capacity, then upsell its captive consumers on additional services.

“They have mastered the ability to get their hands into people’s pockets and to take out every last dollar,” says Ross A. Klein, a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has closely studied the cruise ship industry. “They can almost give a cabin away for free and still make a profit.”

Despite sizeable overhead costs — which include travel agent commissions, fuel, marketing, and payroll — these large crowds yield handsome profits. Industry-wide, cruise lines enjoy net margins of 17%, nearly double the average of some comparably large hotel chains:

Carnival: $3.2B net profit (17% margin)
Royal Caribbean: $1.8B net profit (19% margin)
Norwegian: $955m net profit (16% margin)

To make these figures a bit more relatable, here’s what this works out to on a per-passenger level for a 7-day cruise:

On average, a passenger will spend $1,060 ($151/day) on a ticket and $650 ($92/day) on onboard purchases. After subtracting overhead costs, a ship will make out with roughly $291 in net profit per passenger, per cruise.

That means that at full capacity, a single ship like Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas might make $9.8m in revenue ($1.7m of which is profit) during one 7-day excursion. That’s $239k in profit per day at sea.

As 50% of this money comes from American travelers, one might expect the cruise industry to be a substantial contributor to the US tax system.

But there’s a catch: These companies aren’t technically American. And they harbor what one legal expert calls a “dirty little secret.”

How cruise companies avoid paying US taxes

Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian all have headquarters in Miami, Florida, a city that brands itself as the “Cruise Capital of the World.”

With this homeland base, a large foundation of US customers, and red, white and blue logos, these cruise lines have manufactured an identity as authentically American corporations. President Trump has even called them a “great US business.”

Legal paperwork tells a different story.

International law requires every ship to register with a country and fly its insignia in open waters. A ship is only subject to the laws of the country it is registered in.

Under an obscure, 99-year-old section of the US tax code, cruise companies are able to register their ships with countries that have more lenient laws than the US — an act called flying a “flag of convenience” — and avoid paying into the US tax system.

It’s a tax loophole big enough to drive a cruise ship through.

The cruise industry isn’t alone in avoiding Uncle Sam: US companies use offshore accounts to avoid paying an estimated $90B-per-year in taxes.

But it is especially adept at the practice: Carnival is incorporated in Panama and flies the flags of Panama and the Bahamas; Norwegian is incorporated in, and flies the flag of, the Bahamas; Royal Caribbean has been incorporated in Liberia since 1985, and flies the flags of the Bahamas and Malta.

These impoverished countries often compete with each other to offer cruise lines the cheapest services, much like many US cities groveled for Amazon’s HQ2 by offering large tax cuts.

“Cruise lines want to register somewhere where they pay no taxes, are exempt from labor and wage statues, and don’t have to follow health and safety codes,” says Jim Walker, a Miami-based maritime lawyer. “They’re looking for a place that will leave them alone, not oversee their operations.”

For the most part, that’s what cruise companies have gotten: According to annual report filings, the major cruise lines pay an average tax rate of 0.8% — for below the 21% US corporate tax rate.

The benefits of such arrangements are nominal for the countries that register the ships.

Cruise lines will generally pay a small head tax ($4-$15 per passenger) to call on a port. According to Klein, these countries often spend more on maintaining facilities for cruise ships than they make through the fees.

They might also promise a boost to the economies they frequent. But Klein says they work out deals with local vendors where they take up to 70% of the onshore revenue — and studies have shown that local populations in foreign ports don’t get much out of such partnerships.

Registering ships abroad also shelters cruise companies from US employment and safety laws.

Cruise ships hire crew members from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and “anywhere else you can find people willing to work for nothing,” and demand grueling workloads in exchange for comparatively paltry wages.

The standard contract for a crew member like a cleaner or dishwasher requires a mandatory 308 hours per month — 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as 8-10 months, with no days off — for the equivalent of $400-700 per month, or $1.62 to $2.27 per hour.

Unprotected by labor laws and regulations, crew members who get injured on the job are swiftly replaced, like “fungible goods.”

In a 2019 report, the Cruise Lines International Association, an influential trade group, argues that the cruise industry has a $52.7B “total economic impact” on the US economy and “supports” 421k American jobs. But Klein says it’s unclear what goes into calculating these figures.

The Hustle asked several major cruise lines to comment on the concerns raised in this article. None of the companies responded.

There is one thing the cruise industry has been expeditious about doing on US soil: Lobbying to keep its exemptions in place.

According to the nonprofit Open Secrets, the cruise industry spent $66.2m in lobbying fees between 1998 and 2019. It also made contributions of at least $1.1m to candidates in cruise ship states, including $29.5k to a US representative from Florida who chairs the Panama Caucus, and $23.5k to a senator who fought to blockade a cruise tax.

$813,807 for a single taxpayer-funded rescue effort

While cruise ships avoid paying US taxes, they simultaneously benefit from the services of taxpayer-funded federal agencies.

Professor Klein, who has testified before Congress on matters of cruise ship safety, says that in the past 25 years:

361 passengers have fallen overboard on cruise ships (14 per year)
353 gastrointestinal/norovirus outbreaks have broken out on cruise ships
500+ environmental violations have been charged to cruise ships

In many of these cases, US agencies have to intervene — and taxpayers, not cruise companies, usually eat the cost.

Klein has filed open-records requests and obtained documents on the companies, which he shared with The Hustle. They show that a single cruise ship passenger rescue effort can cost the US Coast Guard and the US Navy from $500k to $1m+. One 2009 search for a woman who fell overboard off the coast of Florida set the Coast Guard back $813,807.

When ships go dead in the water — as was the case with Carnival’s Splendor fire in 2010 and its Triumph disaster in 2013 — these costs can balloon to $5m+.

Walker, the maritime lawyer, adds that, in certain cases, cruise ships also require the resources of taxpayer-funded agencies like the US Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and US Customs and Border Protection.

What does this all mean in the context of coronavirus?

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospitality industry is still reeling.

Cruise ships — often called “floating petri dishes,” for their adeptness at spreading illnesses — were hit especially hard. After at least 21 passengers tested positive for COVID-19 aboard Carnival’s Grand Princess in 2020, the State Department urged the public to “not travel by cruise ship.”

Customers clamored to cancel trips and cruise stocks fell by 60% — the worst stock performance on record for the industry.

Initially, some cruise lines attempted to weather the storm by selling tickets at all costs. According to emails obtained by the Miami New Times, salespeople at Norwegian were instructed to respond to coronavirus-inquiring customers with scripted one-liners, like “The only thing you need to worry about for your cruise is do you have enough sunscreen?”

When we called the company’s booking hotline at the time, a salesperson told us that coronavirus doesn’t exist in tropical climates.

US GOVERNMENT ALREADY SAVING ONE BILLION A DAY$

Elon Musk’s DOGE Already Saving $1 Billion/Day

The watchdog group is headed up by Elon Musk and is still expanding in size and scope. It aims to positively affect the country’s financial bottom line.

“If this trend continues, it could reduce the national deficit by $365 billion by January 2026—equivalent to a 20% cut in the FY2024 deficit of $1.8 trillion,” Coinpedia said Wednesday. “For context, the U.S. spent around $850 billion on defense in 2024, meaning DOGE’s savings could cover almost 43% of that budget. Additionally, with U.S. interest payments on debt reaching $882 billion last year, reducing the deficit by $365 billion could lower interest costs by over $12 billion annually.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE Already Saving $1 Billion a Day

President Donald Trump’s new government watchdog agency that’s headed up by Elon Musk, the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), announced it has already reduced federal spending by approximately $1 billion per day.

“DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations, all consistent with the President’s Executive Orders. A good start, though this number needs to increase to > $3 billion/day,” the Department said in a social media post Tuesday.

DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations, all consistent with the President’s Executive Orders.

A good start,…

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 29, 2025

Notably, DOGE is not a full-fledged federal executive department. Rather, it is a temporary organization focused on reducing government spending as part of Trump’s overall economic policy.

The watchdog group is headed up by Elon Musk and is still expanding in size and scope. It aims to positively affect the country’s financial bottom line.

The group’s social media page lists numerous budget cuts that it has successfully lobbied for.

The GSA terminated three leases of mostly empty office space, with tenants relocating to nearby buildings in the GSA portfolio. With savings of $1.6M, these are the first steps to right size the Federal real estate portfolio of more than 7,500 leases

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 27, 2025

Following up on the $45 million in DEI scholarships in Burma. This has been cancelled. https://t.co/bnAhSYdxnx pic.twitter.com/rFLT2KJA6f

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 29, 2025

Another $145M in federal savings due to cancellations of 16 DEIA contracts by the Departments of Labor, Transportation, Agriculture, Commerce, HHS, and Treasury. Thanks to those departments for their pro-active and rapid work.

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 26, 2025

In the first 80 hours, approx $420M of current/impending contracts have been cancelled. 2 leases have also been cancelled.

Initial focus is mainly on DEI contracts and unoccupied buildings.

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 24, 2025