Biden praises Medal of Honor recipient for rewriting ‘fate of four families’

President Biden on Tuesday awarded the Medal of Honor to a Vietnam-era Army helicopter pilot who saved four of his comrades in a daring rescue mission. Biden called it an act of “incredible” valor that positively changed the lives of four American families.

Former Capt. Larry L. Taylor, of Chattanooga, Tenn., stood patiently next to Biden during the ceremony, adorned in his black military uniform with several pins and badges honoring his years of service.

Before the president draped the Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest military award — over Taylor’s neck and shook his hand, Biden praised the Vietnam veteran for his “extraordinary” years of service.

The president devoted most of the speech to highlighting Taylor’s mission in June 1968 to successfully extract four soldiers out of a hostile war zone in a Vietnamese village.

“He rewrote the fate of four families for generations to come,” Biden said. “That’s valor. That’s power. That’s our nation at its very best.”

Biden also underscored the fact that the four families of those saved American soldiers have expressed frequent appreciation for Taylor’s rescue.

The president, however, noted that when he called Taylor to inform him of the honor and the upcoming ceremony, Taylor had humbly mentioned he needed to “do something” to earn the medal.

“Well, you sure in hell did something,” Biden said in his remarks. “Ask anyone here, I’m pretty sure they’d say you did something extraordinary.”

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President Biden Delivers Remarks on a New Contract Covering America’s West Coast Ports




Biden hails ratification of West Coast dockworker contract

Recent success by maritime and trucking labor unions is contributing to lower inflation and making the U.S. economy stronger, according to President Joe Biden.

Biden made that case on Wednesday in remarks delivered in the State Dining Room at the White House.

“I want to thank both sides for working through this and getting it done,” Biden said, referring to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), whose tentative six-year agreement covering 29 West Coast ports was ratified by ILWU rank and file on Aug. 31.

“It’s a good deal for workers, it’s a good deal for companies, and it’s a good deal for the United States of America.”

The ILWU-PMA contract includes a guaranteed 32% pay increase over the course of the contract and a one-time “hero bonus” — reportedly $70 million — for working through the pandemic.

“With this agreement, [dockworkers] are being paid what they deserve and goods are moving quickly and efficiently across the country,” Biden said.

“Plus, this has a direct impact on reducing inflation. When the cost of moving goods through the supply chains goes up, inflation goes up. Strengthening supply chains … inflation goes down. That’s why we’ve made fixing our supply chains to bring down inflation a top priority. And it’s working.”

Biden also recognized the Teamsters’ ratification of a five-year collective bargaining agreement with UPS, which occurred nine days before West Coast dockworkers approved their contract. The UPS Teamsters contract will allow senior full-time drivers to earn approximately $170,000 a year in wages and benefits, with part- and full-time workers getting $7.50 more in hourly wages over the life of the contract.

“With this historic contract, our Teamsters are going to continue to deliver UPS goods across the country, and our supply chains will continue working the way they should,” Biden said.

The labor agreements build on other actions taken by his administration, Biden noted, including the Ocean Shipping Reform Act that he signed last year. The legislation was passed in part to address severe price increases by foreign container ship operators, which Biden asserted last year — and repeated on Wednesday — had boosted the rate for shipping a container by as much as $1,000 during the pandemic.

“Since then we’ve seen ocean shipping container rates come down to near pre-pandemic levels,” Biden said.

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The US interior department has canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge that were part of a sale held in the waning days of the Trump administration, arguing the sale was legally flawed.

The interior secretary, Deb Haaland, said with her decision to cancel the remaining leases “no one will have rights to drill for oil in one of the most sensitive landscapes on earth”. However, a 2017 law mandates another lease sale by late 2024. Administration officials said they intend to comply with the law.

Two other leases that were issued as part of the first-of-its-kind sale for the refuge in January 2021 were previously given up by the small companies that held them amid legal wrangling and uncertainty over the drilling program.

Alaska political leaders have long pushed to allow oil and gas drilling on the refuge’s 1.5m-acre coastal plain, an area seen as sacred to the Indigenous Gwich’in because it is where caribou they rely on migrate and come to give birth. The state’s congressional delegation in 2017 succeeded in getting language added to a federal tax law that called for the US government to hold two lease sales in the region by late 2024.

Joe Biden, after taking office, issued an executive order calling for a temporary moratorium on activities related to the leasing program and for the interior secretary to review the program. Haaland later in 2021 ordered a new environmental review after concluding there were “multiple legal deficiencies” underlying the Trump-era leasing program. Haaland halted activities related to the leasing program pending the new analysis.

The Alaska industrial development and export authority, a state corporation that won seven leases in the 2021 sale, sued over the moratorium but a federal judge recently found the delay by the interior department to conduct a new review was not unreasonable.