Saturday, November 26, 2022

Bidenomics: 41% of small businesses can't pay rent this month, report warns

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57% of beauty salons said they couldn’t make rent as well as 45% of gyms, 44% of retail and 44% of restaurants, Alignable survey found.

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FDA — Captured and Corrupt

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Via Mercola

reagan udall foundation for the fda

Story at-a-glance

  • While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration itself does not accept corporate money, it does receive money funneled via a nonprofit foundation, which receives money from other nonprofits funded by private interests
  • The Reagan-Udall Foundation is a nonprofit foundation created by Congress in 2007 to support scientific research that is of interest to the FDA. It accepts grants from government, individual donors and other nonprofits — even when those nonprofits are created and funded by industry
  • The Reagan-Udall Foundation has received large donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Ellen Sigal, who currently chairs the Reagan-Udall Foundation’s board of directors, is also vice president of the Cancer Moonshot program, funded by the Gates Foundation, and she’s on the board of the Parker Institute, which is partnered with Inovio, a Gates-funded company that is currently working on a COVID-19 vaccine
  • According to the rules, no more than four of the 14-member board of the Reagan-Udall Foundation are supposed to be representatives of FDA-regulated industries, yet in 2017, nine of the then 13-member board had financial ties to industry at the time of their appointment

If you’re like most people, you probably assume that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is funded by the U.S. government and therefore isn’t catering to private industries.

The agency itself certainly tries to present itself as independent from the industries it regulates but, in reality, legal loopholes have led to the FDA receiving money from, and being captured and corrupted by, private interests.

While the FDA itself does not accept corporate money, it does receive money funneled via a nonprofit foundation, which in turn receives money from other nonprofits funded by private interests. It’s really all a façade because the end result is the same. Those donating the money ultimately end up with the ability to pull strings, when needed.

The Reagan-Udall Foundation

As explained by NPR1 back in 2012, the Reagan-Udall Foundation is a nonprofit foundation created by Congress in 2007 to support scientific research that is of interest to the FDA. According to NPR:2

“The idea was that this foundation could do things the FDA can’t. It would raise money from private sources, fund research in areas where the FDA lacks expertise, and organize collaborations involving industry, patient groups and academia.”

As explained in a 2008 article3 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the creation of the Reagan-Udall Foundation was part of a larger plan to establish a private-public partnership to facilitate the Critical Path Initiative.

The Critical Path Initiative was part of the FDA’s attempts to streamline and modernize the drug approval process by having companies pay user fees. Part of the Reagan-Udall Foundation’s responsibilities was to set goals and priorities for the Critical Path Initiative, and then award grants to meet those goals.

Massive Loophole: Nonprofits Funded by Industry

However, critics voiced concern, saying the Reagan-Udall Foundation might allow the food and medical industries “to sway FDA decisions,” since it could raise money from private, including industry, sources. To quell some of these fears, the Reagan-Udall Foundation said it would only accept grants from government, individual donors and other nonprofits, not industry.

After a few years of scraping by on small, private donations, the foundation received a $150,000 grant from the PhRMA Foundation, another nonprofit foundation funded by drug companies. Being a nonprofit, the PhRMA Foundation fit the description of an acceptable funding source, but just how independent can it actually be when it’s founded and funded by drug companies?

As noted by consumer advocate Sidney Wolfe with Public Citizen, while the PhRMA Foundation is technically a nonprofit, “one can hardly expect that they’re going to do things that are not in the interests of their funders.”4

Indeed, and this influence is in addition to the influence food, drug and medical device companies already have, by way of user fees. Again, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act established an accelerated application process for new drugs. The sped-up process is funded through industry-paid fees.

This fee, however, works more like a payoff or soft bribe. When a company pays the FDA for an accelerated review, the agency no longer has an incentive to find fault with the product or demand more extensive testing.

FDA Foundation Funded by the Gates Foundation

Not surprisingly, the Reagan-Udall Foundation has received large donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which we now know rarely does anything that doesn’t benefit Gates’ personal bottom line and overall agenda.

As detailed in “Bill Gates — Most Dangerous Philanthropist in Modern History?” Gates has used his philanthropy to shape public policy in ways that benefit his own agenda.

A March 17, 2020, article5 in The Nation titled, “Bill Gates’ Charity Paradox,” even points out that the Gates Foundation has given $2 billion in tax-deductible charitable donations to private companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, IBM, Vodafone, the Mastercard affiliate MasterCard Labs for Financial Inclusion,6,7 Scholastic Inc. and NBC Universal Media.8,9

Many of these so-called donations end up benefiting the Gates Foundation, as it also invests in the very same companies and industries that it donates money to. This circular economy is why Gates just keeps getting richer, the more money he gives away.

Part of this wealth growth also appears to be due to the tax breaks given for charitable donations. In short, it’s a perfect money-shuffling scheme that limits taxes while maximizing income generation.

If donating to for-profit companies sounds oddly illegal to you, you’d be right. Gates is a tax evader for doing so — he’s simply getting away with it. The nonprofit foundation is a disguise to avoid taxes while funding the research arms of for-profit organizations that his foundation is invested in, which is illegal.

The image below shows donations received by the Reagan-Udall Foundation in 2013. Topping the list is the Gates Foundation, whose contributions for the year amounted to $977,165, followed by a string of drug companies.

donations received by the reagan udall foundation

Board Members With Ties to Industry

In addition to all of this financial clout, food, drug and medical device makers also have the ability to exert influence over the FDA via the members10 of the Foundation board, and this was a concern right from the get-go.

As reported in the 2008 Journal of the National Cancer Institute article,11 members of the then-newly created Reagan-Udall Foundation executive board had troubling ties to industry — and to the Gates Foundation, which years later (see above) ended up being a top financial donor. The article, written by Joel B. Finkelstein, reads, in part:12

“The Food and Drug Administration’s most recent steps toward modernizing the drug approval process have renewed some old questions about the FDA’s relationship with the industries it regulates.

Several public advocacy groups affiliated with physicians and researchers have voiced their concern over the appointment of certain members to a newly formed agency board. The groups have warned that some members may have conflicts of interest due to past or current roles as board members of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms …

The [Reagan-Udall] foundation’s board of directors, appointed by the FDA commissioner, will be largely responsible for establishing by-laws, selecting an executive director to oversee day-to-day operations, and reporting to Congress on foundation activities and operations.

The federal statute stipulates that of the 14 members named to the board, four members should come from industry, three from academia, two from consumer or patient advocacy organizations, and one from the health provider community. The remaining four spots are open to anyone with relevant expertise.

The FDA has already chosen the members and is organizing the Reagan–Udall Foundation. However, some advocacy groups are concerned that several nonindustry members have strong ties to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including one who is currently under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee.

Tadataka ‘Tachi’ Yamada, M.D., currently heads the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s global health program but until 2006 worked as head of research for the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.

Senate investigators have uncovered evidence suggesting that, during his tenure with the company, he may have been involved in an effort to intimidate a scientist who was raising questions about the heart risks associated with the company’s blockbuster diabetes drug rosiglitazone maleate (Avandia).”

While the Reagan-Udall Foundation is the nonprofit arm of the FDA, the agency does not have the authority to set conflict-of-interest policies for the foundation.13 This, of course, leaves the door wide open for conflicts of interest and allows the Foundation to become a hidden back door of sorts, for corporate influence.

Industry Dictates Level of Evidence FDA Should Use

A more recent article,14 published in 2017 in The BMJ, points out that when the Reagan-Udall Foundation is using “big data” assess drug risks and device complications, they’re using “levels of evidence recommended by industry.” The potential for manipulation should be obvious. The article, written by BMJ associate editor Jeanne Lenzer, reads, in part:15

“Big data can be used cautiously to examine real world outcomes and to improve surveillance of drug safety … However, big data are a noisy mess, and analyses by entities with profit motives may identify spurious associations that support fast track approvals and indication creep (broadening the indications for drugs and devices).

The Reagan-Udall Foundation curates real world evidence or ‘big data’ derived from routinely collected health data from insurance claims, electronic health records, voluntary registries, and social media.

The U.S. drug and device regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, says that such data can speed up research, ‘saving time and money’ for ‘therapeutic development, outcomes research [and] safety surveillance.’

In January [2013], Robert Califf, then FDA commissioner, announced the launch of Innovation in Medical Evidence Development and Surveillance (IMEDS), a foundation project that he said would collect and analyze big data to identify ‘important safety issues.’

However, critics of the move say that big data are poor for identifying adverse events … Financial conflicts of interest, they worry, could influence the way big data are used, including exploitation of the weaknesses inherent in observational data to win FDA approval for new uses of drugs and devices and to exonerate drugs of previously detected harms. There is evidence and precedent to support both concerns.”

Lenzer also points out that the Foundation’s board of directors still has financial ties to the drug and device makers that the FDA is supposed to regulate. She notes that while no more than four of the 14-member board should be representatives of FDA regulated industries, in 2017, nine of the then 13-member board had financial ties to industry at the time of their appointment.

The Ties That Bind

To give just one example of how conflicts of interest can have real-world implications, take the case of Ellen V. Sigal, Ph.D.16 Sigal chairs the Reagan-Udall Foundation’s board of directors.17

She’s also vice president of the Cancer Moonshot program, and it too is funded by the Gates Foundation. Sigal’s colleague at the Cancer Moonshot Program, Dr. Doug Lowy, is a co-inventor of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, and Sigal’s son, David Sigal, is married to New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman, who sponsored a bill to make Gardasil mandatory for all school children in New York.

Hoylman also supported a bill that would allow children as young as 9 to receive the HPV vaccine at school without the knowledge or consent of their parents. Gates, of course, is also a supporter of HPV vaccination and funds HPV vaccine research.

Lastly, Sigal is on the board of the Parker Institute, which is partnered with a company called Inovio. Inovio, which is funded by the Gates Foundation, is working on a COVID-19 vaccine. When you start tracing relationships, it’s amazing how often you find the Gates Foundation involved in matters relating to forced vaccinations and the destruction of legal protections.

FDA’s Lax Oversight of Clinical Research

Sad to say, it’s hard to find a government agency that hasn’t been captured by private interests. I’ve written several articles detailing the corruption at the CDC, for example, including “CDC Petitioned to Stop Lying About Pharma Funds,” “How Conflicts of Interest Have Corrupted the CDC” and “Public Health Agency Sued for Coke Collusion.”

The same can be said about the World Health Organization which, of course, is also funded by the Gates Foundation. In fact, when the U.S. withdrew its funding, Gates stepped in and became the largest funder — larger even than entire nations.

Without doubt, the FDA can be added to the list of agencies that largely serves corporate masters, hidden as they may be behind nonprofit façades. A recent investigative report18 by Science Magazine highlights the agency’s failures when it comes to overseeing clinical research, which is one of its many duties.

FDA documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests reveal it rarely sanctions or penalizes researchers or research companies even when grave problems — including fraud — are found.

Inspectors conduct routine visits to research trial sites and review trial records to make sure research parameters and safety protocols are followed. They also respond to complaints by whistleblowers.

However, FDA documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests reveal it rarely sanctions or penalizes researchers or research companies even when grave problems — including fraud — are found. What’s more, there’s a marked trend toward less and less adequate oversight.

Case in point: Aspen Clinical Research, run by Dr. Michael Harris, has on numerous occasions over the past decade been cited for “egregious errors” in its clinical trials, yet the FDA never followed through on its threats to fine, prosecute or disqualify Harris from conducting clinical research in the U.S. According to the report, written by Charles Piller:19

“FDA found there were serious lapses in obtaining informed consent from trial volunteers, unqualified staff made medical assessments, and Harris failed to properly report abnormal lab test results. He also did not disclose that trial participants were taking opioid, antidepressant, or antipsychotic drugs — which could have skewed results or posed safety concerns.

The agency said Aspen’s records were disorganized, contradictory, and sometimes backdated in a way that ‘begs the question of the authenticity and veracity of data collected.’ Those ‘serious, ongoing deviations’ might constitute ‘fraud, scientific misconduct,’ and ‘significant human subject protection violations,’ according to FDA documents …

Repeat problems and a raft of new ones emerged during inspections in 2014, 2015, and 2019. Each time, in responses to FDA, Harris admitted some transgressions, strenuously disputed others, and promised to improve.

Through all that, FDA never formally sanctioned Harris or pursued other penalties. The agency never made public the alleged offenses or told trial participants they might have been put at risk. Nor did it tell companies sponsoring some of the trials that their data might have been compromised …

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical and medical device companies continued to contract with Aspen. Since 2011, they have paid the firm millions of dollars for work on at least 65 trials, and Aspen is now recruiting people for nine new trials on Alzheimer’s disease, autism, depression, and other serious disorders.”

According to Piller, this isn’t a rare case. After reviewing some 1,600 FDA inspection and enforcement documents, Piller’s conclusion is that the “FDA’s enforcement of clinical research regulations is often light-handed, slow-moving, and secretive.”

“Clear corrections of inspector-reported dangerous or unlawful clinical trial practices were the exception, even amid signs that trial participants were harmed and that data underpinning evidence-based medicine were corrupted,” Piller writes.

“On the rare occasions when FDA formally warned researchers of findings that they had broken the law, the agency often neglected to ensure that fixes occurred … Moreover, the agency frequently closed cases on the basis of unverified claims by those accused.”

I recommend reading Piller’s report in its entirety. It’s a sobering read that raises all sorts of questions about drug safety.

If a drug trial is riddled with errors, omissions and outright fraud and falsification of documents and data — examples of which are given in Piller’s report — and this research is then used to gain FDA approval, the chances of that drug being harmful can be considerable. Clearly, oversight without follow-up and follow-through when problems are found is about as useful as no oversight at all.



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Thursday, November 24, 2022

Vaccinated Women

The topic of pregnant and nursing moms getting vaccinated under encouragement and coercion is painful. It’s painful to research, painful to write about, and painful to learn how carelessly the most precious among us are being treated.

Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide: Dr. Naomi Wolf on the Pfizer “Confidential Report”

Outspoken with Dr. Naomi Wolf 30 May 2022 Visit and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

What did Germans know? Secret anti-Nazi diary gives voice to man on the street

Half a century after Friedrich Kellner gifted his Nazi-era diary to a grandson in America, the clandestine writings will be published in English by Cambridge University Press in January.

Anti-Lockdown Stanford Professor: “Academic Freedom Is Dead”

A Stanford Professor who challenged the orthodoxy of lockdowns has warned that “academic freedom is dead,” and that all those who have stood up to the regime narrative now face “a deeply hostile work environment.”

Video: Greenwald Slams Hunter Biden Laptop Coverup As “Biggest Media Fraud” In A Decade

As yet more evidence of potentially illegal business practices (in addition to debauchery) has emerged from the Hunter Biden laptop debacle, journalist Glenn Greenwald described the saga as “the single biggest media fraud” in the past decade.

New US Analysis Shows The Vaccinated Now Make Up The Majority of COVID Deaths

  • A new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August in the United States occurred in people who had completed at least their primary serious of vaccines.

  • In July 59 percent of COVID deaths were among the vaccinated.

  • According to the CDC, unvaccinated people are still dying from COVID at six times the rate of those who got at least the primary series of the vaccine.

  • Vaccine injury data continues to be ignored

From Covid to CBDC: The Path to Full Control

Every indication is that CBDC’s arrival is imminent and COVID-19 was the catalyst.

It’s seemed evident for a while that the current fiat monetary system is, at best, unstable. At worst, it’s a Ponzi scheme whose time has expired. If that’s the case, I suspect the central bankers and 0.1% know this and might be prepared to usher in the new system before the old one collapses on itself – even as they loot it on the way down with the most significant wealth transfer in human history.

To anyone who pays attention to these trends, it seems evident that Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will be that new system.


https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/from-covid-to-cbdc-the-path-to-full-control

Secret CDC Report reveals at least 1.1 Million Americans have ‘Died Suddenly’ since the COVID Vaccine roll-out & another Government Report proves the COVID Vaccines are to blame



The Covid-19 injections were meant to reduce the sudden surge of deaths the USA recorded in 2020 due to the alleged Covid-19 pandemic. But unfortunately, the official figures prove that the opposite has happened.

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Breitbart Business Digest: A Bad Day to Be a Billionaire Oligarch Savior of Humanity

Are you sitting down? The economy might be in a recession. It was not a great day to be a billionaire oligarch savior of humanity.

USA has suffered shocking 350k Excess Deaths in 2022 so far; evidence suggests COVID Vaccination is to blame

Official figures published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirm that the United States of America suffered nearly 350,000 excess deaths as of September 25th 2022.

German Public TV Compares Elon Musk To Goebbels

Authored by Robert Kogon via The Brownstone Institute,After Germany’s “first” public television network, ARD, compared Elon Musk reducing Twitter censorship to “letting rats out of their holes,” Germany’s “second” public television network, ZDF, has now compared Musk to Nazi Propag

J6 Political Prisoner And Veteran Army Combat Medic Billy Chrestman Writes Heartbreaking Letter To The Gateway Pundit After Spending Two Years In DC Gulag Hellhole

My name is Billy Chrestman. I am a Jan 6 detainee and former Proud Boy. I am currently incarcerated in the DC Gulag. I’m 49 years old. I have 5 children and 4 grandchildren. I’m a former US Army medic. For the last 15, years before getting arrested, I have been a union sheetmetal worker.

Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion

Via Mercola Story at-a-glance Government, Big Tech companies and the media only added to the scandal by suppressing free speech and open debate about the safety and effectiveness of the shots In November 2020, Pfizer claimed their COVID-19 shot was 95% effective against COVID-19, but this was highl

You're Living In A World Wrought By The Federal Reserve. Notice Anything Wrong?

In her new book, veteran Wall Street watcher and economist Nomi Prins warns that central bank strategies deployed since the financial crisis are destroying the real economy, worsening inequality, and creating societal chaos.

Massive ‘CitizenFreePress’ News Site Suspended from Musk’s Twitter for Sharing Video of Obama Admitting Election Machine Exploits.

The heavily-trafficked news aggregation site CitizenFreePress.com has been suspended from Twitter for sharing a clip of former President Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2008, discussing potential problems with American voting machines and demanding paper trails for ballots.

FDA attorney argues guidance against ivermectin for COVID was recommendation, 'not mandatory'

"An attorney for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration argued that the agency's guidance against taking ivermectin for COVID was ""not mandatory"" and a recommendation. ""The cited statements were not directives. They were not mandatory. They were recommendations."

You’ve Been Gaslighted – Democrats Just Stole Another Election

When something is so obvious, if the outcome makes no sense, if the outcome is literally impossible, then it is what it is. Forget “proof.” You know it. You saw it. You felt it. You experienced it. It happened. It’s real. The 2022 midterm was just stolen. Just like 2020.

Outrageous! FDA Backtracks During Trial and Now Claims ‘Not Taking Ivermectin for COVID-19’ was Merely a Recommendation

In December 2021, the FDA warned Americans not to use Ivermectin  that “is intended for animals” to treat or prevent COVID-19.

BOMBSHELL : Veritas Documents Reveal DC Bureaucrats Had Evidence Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine Were Effective in Treating COVID : BUT HID THIS FROM PUBLIC

There have now been 67 Ivermectin COVID-19 controlled studies that show a 67% improvement in COVID patients. There have been 298 Hydroxychloroquine studies that show a 64% improvement in patients for COVID-19 patients.

Eye-opening': Catherine Engelbrecht was kept in solitary with no privacy

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht – who was jailed with colleague Gregg Phillips for refusing to disclose a confidential source in a probe of alleged foreign interference in U.S.

The “Inside Job” Hypothesis of the 9/11 Attacks: JFK, Fidel Castro and the American Left

Incisive and carefully documented analysis by Prof. Graeme MacQueen. On November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.

BRAZIL: Lula Minister Signs Order Allowing Child Services to Take Children Away from Free Election Protesters

Children and mothers march in free election protests in Brazil. Jane Zirkle at The War Room reported on Sunday that Brazilian Justice Inspector, Minister Luis Felipe Salomao.

No Evidence Freedom Convoy Donations Were From Criminal Origins: GoFundMe Exec

An executive from the online crowdfunding platform GoFundMe said in testimony before a parliamentary committee that there is no evidence suggesting that any of the funds raised for the Freedom Convoy protest through the platform were illegal or acquired through criminal means.

Study finds number of Athletes who have ‘Died Suddenly’ has increased by 1700% since COVID Vaccination began

An investigation of official statistics has found that the number of athletes who died suddenly between the beginning of 2021 and April 2022 rose exponentially compared to the yearly number of deaths of athletes officially recorded between 1966 and 2004.

Injecting Freedom

Safeguarding individual rights demands constant legal, social, and political struggle against government censorship, coercion, and mandates.

Ultraprocessed Food Linked to Early Death

Eating ultraprocessed foods is a significant cause of premature death, according to researchers with the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Plato's Cave site traffic now down to 1% of what it was. Google blocking postings except manually entered. Not a good sign.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Facebook: Any Religious Views Shared on Your Profile Will Be Removed

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Facebook has announced that it will begin policing people’s personal profiles and remove any references to religious or political beliefs. Facebook is changing the information users are allowed to post as part of their profile beginning Dec. 1, according to reports.

Justin Bieber: Facial Paralysis Is ‘Punishment’ For Exposing Illuminati Pedophilia

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A Hollywood insider has revealed that Justin Bieber believes his recent misfortunes are a physical manifestation of the dark forces that took control of his body and soul after joining the Illuminati at the start of his career. Hold onto your seats, because this is about to get wild.

The Wrath of Nancy: NBC Correspondent Miguel Almaguer Suspended After Viral Report on Paul Pelosi and David DePape

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NBC News pulled their bombshell report in early November by Miguel Almaguer on the attack on Paul Pelosi that included details that contradicted the narrative in the federal charging papers against accused attacker David DePape.

"Election Denial" for Me, But Not for Thee: YouTube Censors TK-Produced Videos, Again, Despite Factual Accuracy

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In late September videographer Matt Orfalea made a pair of videos for TK.

5 Million Watch Stew Peters’ New ‘Died Suddenly’ Film in First 24 Hours, Smashing Left-Wing Censors

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5 million viewers watched Stew Peters’ new Died Suddenly film within the first 24 hours following its release, and the momentum shows no sign of stopping, with viewership tallies continuing to climb and internet users sharing the groundbreaking new film faster than Big Tech censors can take it down.

Died Suddenly, the new film from Stew Peters and his mega-viral Stew Peters Network, generated massive traffic in its first 24 hours online, raking in more than 3.1 million views on Rumble alone between its release on Monday evening, and the same time on Tuesday.

The film went on to rake in more than a million more Rumble views overnight on Tuesday and into Wednesday morning.

Still, the views are climbing.

At the current count, more than 4.6 million viewers have watched the Stew Peters Network’s Died Suddenly film on Rumble alone.

Died Suddenly Rumble ViewsStew Peters’ new Died Suddenly film has already surpassed 4.6 million views on Rumble alone.

Watch The Full “Died Suddenly” Film HERE

Died Suddenly continues raking in massive amounts of views on Twitter as well.

Despite the best efforts of the Big Tech corporation to keep a lid on things, seemingly barring the film from its list of trending topicsDied Suddenly has received a whopping 1.2 million views on the Twitter platform.

Died Suddenly Twitter ViewsDied Suddenly has received 1.2 million views on Big Tech platform Twitter, despite censorship efforts.

In addition to keeping Died Suddenly off of the trending charts, Twitter appears to have de-listed the @DiedSuddenly account altogether.

When the account is searched for by name, multiple other accounts appear, but not @DiedSuddenly, the account from which Twitter users can stream the full Stew Peters Network documentary film.

Twitter appears to have de-listed Died Suddenly from search results.

Watch The Full “Died Suddenly” Film HERE

Twitter isn’t the only Big Tech corporation trying to halt the viewing of Died Suddenly, as the new film threatens to blow the lid off of the narrative so carefully procured by corrupt global power brokers.

On Facebook, users are being censored before they can even post links to the Died Suddenly film, with the social media platform telling them that their post has been “declined,” as if they swiped a bad credit card.

Google has joined in on the campaign to stifle the film as well.

Long notorious for manipulating search results in favor of left-wing interests, Google has visibly tried to push negative corporate media stories about the film to the top of its search engine results.

The censorship effort has apparently been in vain though, as millions of viewers continue watching Died Suddenly and spreading links to the film like wildfire online.

Watch The Full “Died Suddenly” Film HERE



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DIED SUDDENLY : Official figures show at least Three-Quarters of a Million People have “Died Suddenly” across just 20% of all Countries throughout 2022 & Official Government Reports prove COVID Vaccination is to blame



If you type ‘Died Suddenly’ into Google then you’ll find several news articles posted daily of young adults and children who have unfortunately suffered that very fate. It’s a trend which has unfortunately been increasing over the past two years, and it is showing no sings of slowing down.

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Leading British Cardiologist, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, and Dr. Peter McCullough Independently Come to Same Conclusion



Until the British cardiologist, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, expressed grave concern about the safety of Covid mRNA vaccines, he was one of the most celebrated doctors in Britain.

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Recovered Covid Hospital Patients Found to Have Altered Brain Function and Implications for the Vaccinated



The recent confirmation via biomolecular studies that Covid is very highly likely to have resulted from the lab escape of an engineered pathogen, places both Covid and mRNA vaccination on a similarly sinister footing.

ORIGINAL LINK

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

AP Editor Said She “Can’t Imagine” A US Intelligence Official Being Wrong



The Associated Press journalist who reported a US intelligence official’s false claim that Russia had launched missiles at Poland last week has been fired.

ORIGINAL LINK

Swiss Doctor Locked Away in Mental Asylum for Speaking Against COVID Laws

ORIGINAL LINK

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

Dr. Thomas Binder is a Swiss cardiologist with over 34 years of experience in treating respiratory infections. He received a doctorate in immunology and virology, specializing in internal medicine and cardiology, from the University of Zurich. Binder is an intelligent man who was deemed insane by the Swiss government for speaking out against COVID regulations.

Dr. Binder has been an outspoken critic of COVID restrictions since the beginning of the pandemic. On April 9, 2020, the cardiologist criticized the government’s response to COVID and provided his own analysis of the virus. He posted his thoughts on his private website, and the post received over 20,000 views.

Three days later, a day before Easter, 60 armed police officers and 20 members of the Kantonspolizei Aargau’s anti-terrorism unit forcibly removed Dr. Binder from his home. Authorities searched through the doctor’s online activity and could not find anything to use against him. However, an emergency room doctor who was working with the authorities arrived and diagnosed Dr. Binder with “corona insanity.” He was locked away in a mental asylum for questioning the COVID narrative.

Yet, he refuses to be silenced. He is now a member of the Doctors for COVID Ethics and the German Physicians and Scientists for Health, Freedom, and Democracy. I applaud him for still speaking against coronavirus mandates despite the government’s pitiful attempt to silence him.



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Monday, November 21, 2022

The Solemn Stillness Before Winter

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Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

“Ultimately, the Democratic Party is a criminal organization; and to support it is to be a criminal. And since it is the ruling party, unless you oppose it, you support it.”Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror

KEEP CALM THE PARTY IS ALWAYS RIGHT Poster | always right | Keep Calm-o-Matic

Here in New England now, the landscape is putting itself to bed, preparing for winter’s long sleep. The grass in the cow pastures never looks greener than in contrast to the now barren trees, but that lingering color, too, will soon fade. We did not get smacked here by the deep snows of far-off Buffalo, not a flake, so a sweetly solemn stillness settles over these tender hills as we give vague thanks at Thursday’s gala of gluttony, certain to induce terrors of indigestion in the restless night to come.

I am thankful to still be here after all these years — more than that, grateful! And with the prospect of seeing what comes next: the beginning of a great correction for a country gone off the rails in greed, bad faith, and treachery. Everything rooted in lies and fakery is primed to blow down in the political storms ahead.

It’s fitting that the last straw on this beast’s back was the phoniest scam of all, and saturated with every known sort of millennial Woke posturing: the FTX swindle. Its avatar, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), proved to be a special species of villain, the idiot-savant slob, clever enough to somehow winkle a physics degree out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but not very good with the basic math of money — for instance, the equation that margin must equal collateral — and really really bad at covering his oafish tracks.

In the dramatic demise of FTX, the self-styled crypto-currency-exchange, all the nefarious connections between the great ills of our time stand out starkly in a sudden, glaring light, namely: the dubious Covid-19 pandemic and all the punitive measures cooked up by officialdom, with help from FTX’s money, to supposedly combat the virus, especially the deadly mRNA “vaccines” still being pushed on a credulous public; the sinister operations of so-called hedge funds and their role in magically levitating the financial markets of an economy foundering on necrotizing malinvestments and debt that can never be paid; and the Satanic endeavors of a political faction, the Democratic Party of Chaos, in subverting every institution from sea to shining sea from schools, to courts, to elections while shoving the US into a land war in Europe.

A few weeks after the FTX breakdown, and the extrinsic cascading failures around the crypto-currency netherworld, spreading wildly through pension funds, banks, and insurance companies, the great stillness of November also blankets the regulatory apparatus supposedly guarding the public from financial fraud — most conspicuously the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, a Dutch uncle in the Bankman-Fried extended clan.

The FBI is too busy chasing down evangelicals and Attorney General Merrick Garland remains fixated on nailing former president Trump on any kind of confected felony, despite six years of fervent investigations from the US Attorney’s Southern District of New York, to New York’s AG Letitia James — who ran for office promising to persecute citizen D.J. Trump — to Robert Mueller’s two-year intimidation campaign that came up with exactly nothing.

Now Mr. Garland has activated one particular federal attorney, Jack Smith, with a long record as a partisan attack dog, as special counsel to finally get the job done against Mr. Trump, the proverbial indictment-worthy ham sandwich awaiting a DC District grand jury. Any cockamamie charge will do as long as it’s a felony. Mr. Garland’s strategy is two-fold: 1) to negate Mr. Trump’s remaining political career; and 2) set up a situation that will permit all DOJ attorneys and FBI officers to demur from questioning before Republican majority congressional committees about everything-under-the-sun on the grounds that the questions are germane to “ongoing investigations” that can’t be compromised. That’s the game.

By the time that game kicks-off, early January 2023, the country is liable to be punch-drunk and stumbling from a financial market crash that signals the start of an economic depression more consequential than the calamity of the 1930s. Meanwhile, Russia’s cleanup of the US-instigated mess in Ukraine will be nearly complete, to the ignominy of “Joe Biden,” at the same time that the putative president’s crimes of bribery and treason — should he still be among the living — get aired in Congress without any help required from Mr. Garland’s Justice Department — the evidence from Hunter’s laptop having already been well-perused and catalogued by an army of outside independent investigators.

This will all occur against the background of the now-unraveled Covid-19 story. By early 2023 the evidence of excess all-causes deaths and disabilities resulting from Pfizer and Moderna shots will be overwhelming and the nation will know it got played by a scheme between the corrupt public health authorities, the pharma companies, and the corporate medical establishment, including its discredited journals. Nobody in America will ever trust a doctor again.

We’ll also probably know a good deal more about the dark and dirty deeds around the 2022 midterm election as the FTX scandal spools out and the probably hundreds of millions of FTX investor’s dollars that were express-delivered into Democratic Party coffers for ballot harvesting operations are revealed, along with the exact methods used to accomplish the mega-fraud.

So, enjoy the still moments of this Thanksgiving before the cacophony of mid-winter commences to roar and rage across this hapless land. Say a prayer for the heroes-in-waiting aiming to rescue the republic from the depredations of the vicious Woke-Jacobin Left. And, along with your other preps, lay in some sodium bicarbonate for the awful heartburn to follow.



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Brazilians protesting election results have their bank accounts frozen

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Some Brazilians protesting President Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat are having their bank accounts frozen. The reports come days after the electoral court ordered the blocking of major social media accounts disputing the results.

Bolsonaro lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month in a closely contested election by a 49.1% to 50.9% margin.

Following his defeat, thousands of truck drivers parked their vehicles on highways across the country, like what truckers in Canada did to protest Covid measures. The protesters were claiming that the election was stolen.

“It is necessary, appropriate and urgent to block the bank accounts of those investigated, given the possibility of using resources to finance illicit and undemocratic acts, in order to stop the injury or threat to law,” said De Moraes, saying that there have been “repeated abuse of the right to assemble.”

De Moraes alleged the “several antidemocratic acts” began after protesting truck drivers “began to block traffic on several highways of the country.”

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes is cracking down on those doubting the election results.

“Those who by criminal means have been taking part in anti-democratic acts will be treated like criminals,” he said after suspending several key Bolsonaro supporters from social media.

Several local news outlets have reported that Moraes has frozen the bank accounts of over 40 people and companies that have been linked with the protests.

While in New York last week, Moraes said that “democracy in Brazil was attacked, but it survived.” He added that the trend of doubting election results was started in the US by the right and “spread to Eastern Europe and then to Brazil.”

Moraes’s tactics are following the tactics Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used against civil liberties protesters of the Freedom Convoy – a move that Trudeau is still being investigated over.



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Sunday, November 20, 2022

[Wow. The irony and the cognitive dissonance. Leading to stunningly accurate conclusions by oblivious researchers.] COVID-19 Conspiracies Are a Gateway to Other Conspiracy Theories, Study Warns

The technical term here is conspiracist ideation, which measures someone's confidence in explanations of events that rely on the power of groups to manipulate outcomes to an unlikely, if not near impossible degree. For the study's purpose, the researchers considered conspiracy theories to be beliefs that aren't supported by any evidence – and which are actually contradicted by the evidence that does exist.

These can be anything from believing the Moon landing was staged to thinking that legitimate elections are rigged.

In the case of COVID-19, conspiracy theories include the idea that the pandemic was largely exaggerated by the government or the media, and the belief that the virus was released on purpose by a particular agency for sinister means.

"It's speculative, but it appears that once people adopt one conspiracy belief, it promotes distrust in institutions more generally – it could be government, science, the media, whatever," says psychologist Russell Fazio, from The Ohio State University.

"Once you start viewing events through that distrustful lens, it's very easy to adopt additional conspiracy theories."

UPDATE: Ariz. AG Takes Action – Ballots Reported in Black Duffle Bags – Officials Broke Election Laws – State Demands Names

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Arizona Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright — with the Elections Integrity Unit — wrote a letter to the Maricopa County officials Saturday demanding an accounting for the widespread ballot tabulation and ballot printer problems seen during the general election on Nov. 8.

Among the most troubling issues raised in the letter directed to Thomas Liddy with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office was the apparent co-mingling of ballots in black duffle bags in at least one polling location, which were successfully run through the on-site tabulators with those put in “Door 3” to be sent to the Election Department’s downtown Phoenix tabulation center because they could not be read.

“The Elections Integrity Unit (“Unit”) of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office (“AGO”) has received hundreds of complaints since Election Day pertaining to issues related to the administration of the 2022 General Election in Maricopa County,” Wright opened her letter.

“These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law,” she continued.

Wright wrote that statements made by Maricopa Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer, along with other official communications from the county appear to confirm potential election law violations.

Wright recounted that based on information provided by the county at least 60 polling locations’ ballot on-demand printers were configured improperly, leading to the inability of the tabulators to read the ballots.

Ballots are printed on demand because voters are able to check in at any location in Maricopa County, which includes multiple congressional, state and local districts.

BREAKING: Arizona AG @brnoforaz sends a letter to Maricopa County.

“Arizonans deserve a full report and accounting of the myriad problems that occurred in relation to Maricopa County’s administration of the 2022 General Election.”#AZVoterSuppression pic.twitter.com/o2YfdNG1wN

— Olivia Brown🇺🇸 (@oliviaintheusa) November 20, 2022

“Based on sworn complaints submitted by election workers employed by Maricopa County, the BOD printers were tested on Monday, November 7 without any apparent problems,” Wright wrote.

Despite these tests, the printers began malfunctioning within the first half-an-hour on Election Day.

In light of this, the AG’s office wants logs related to when printer configuration changes were made, along with other related information.

Wright also wanted to know the instructions poll workers gave to voters who experienced problems with their ballots being accepted by tabulation machines.

“Following widespread reports of problems at voting locations on Election Day, Chairman Gates publicly stated that voters who had already checked in to e-Pollbook, but were having difficulties voting could ‘check out’ of that voting location, and would be able to nonetheless vote in another voting location,” she wrote.

“Based on sworn complaints received by the Unit, not only have poll workers reported that they were not trained and/or not provided with information on how to execute ‘check out’ procedures, but many voters have reported the second voting location required the voter to cast a provisional ballot as the e-Pollbooks maintained the voter had cast a ballot in the original voting location.” she added.

Wright pointed out that Arizona state law prohibits a voter to cast a provisional ballot who has already been signed in electronically.

Additionally, the attorney noted that state law was also apparently violated when poll workers failed to keep ballots that were successfully tabulated on site segregated from those that were not.

Maricopa County has admitted that[,] in some voting locations, ‘Door 3’ non-tabulated ballots were commingled with tabulated ballots at the voting location,” Wright wrote.

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“Further, we have received a sworn complaint from an election observer indicating that more than 1700 ‘Door 3’ non-tabulated ballots from one voting location were placed in black duffle bags that were intended to be used for tabulated ballots,” she added.

“Pursuant to Arizona law, Maricopa County was required to complete ‘reconciliation of ballots cast against check ins’ at the voting locations before leaving the voting location, not at central count.”

The AG’s office requested a copy of each voting location’s Official Ballot Report, along with the total number of ballots that were co-mingled.

Wright further demanded a response to all the issues raised in her letter on or before Nov. 28 when a official canvas is of due to Arizona’s Secretary of State office.

“Arizonans deserve a full report and accounting of the myriad problems that occurred in relation to Maricopa County’s administration of the 2022 General Election. As the canvass is looming, and these issues relate to Maricopa County’s ability to lawfully certify election results,” she concluded.

Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s campaign has called for a redo of the election in Maricopa County in light of all the problems that occurred on Election Day.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post UPDATE: Ariz. AG Takes Action – Ballots Reported in Black Duffle Bags – Officials Broke Election Laws – State Demands Names appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.



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Study Identifies variety of Tactics used to Silence Doctors and Scientists



A defrocked philosopher and bon viveur, Giordano Bruno committed a heinous crime: his philosophy did not agree with the official science embodied by the Catholic Church. Bruno thought the earth rotated around other planets and the universe was infinite: real heresy.

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Sweden Finds “Foreign Objects” & Explosive Residue On Nord Stream Pipelines

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Swedish investigators announced Friday the conclusion of their formal investigation into the Nord Stream pipeline blasts on September 26. To nobody’s surprise, the investigation has concluded the natural gas leaks which rocked European energy markets and resulted in tit-for-tat accusations between Moscow and the West was the result of “gross sabotage”. 

While not naming a culprit, the Swedish final report of this initial stage of the inquiry uncovered evidence of “foreign objects” placed on the pipelines

“During analyzes carried out, residues of explosives have been identified on several of the foreign objects seized,” the report said

The Swedish Prosecution Authority’s statement said, “In the crime scene investigations carried out on site in the Baltic Sea, the area and the extensive damage to the gas lines as a result of the detonations have been extensively documented.”

Russia has denied responsibility, while at the same time pointing the finger at Washington or its allies. Swedish investigators say they will now work toward establishing who was behind the sabotage:

“The advanced analysis work is still in progress – the aim is to draw more definitive conclusions about the Nord Stream incidents,” the agency said. “The investigation is extensive and complex and will eventually show whether anyone can be suspected of, and later prosecuted for this.”

Previously, Denmark and Sweden said soon after the massive leaks in late September that the blasts “probably corresponded to an explosive load of several hundred kilos.”

Of course, the gas pipeline did not explode on its own. The aim was to sabotage and prevent #Europe from thinking of resupplying the continent with #Russia's gas for a while.

Traces of explosives found at Nord Stream pipelines, Sweden says https://t.co/aSUs4W7n5s

— Elijah J. Magnier 🇪🇺 (@ejmalrai) November 18, 2022

Russian media sources, as well as a handful of Western pundits, have alleged that US naval activity was observed in that regional of the Baltic Sea during the time of the incident. 

If Sweden ultimately says that Russia was behind the attack on the pipelines, Moscow is likely to dismiss it, and call for their own independent access to and investigation of the evidence and site.



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WATCH: Dr. Robert Malone discloses in new book 'things I no longer believe'

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Dr. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone at the Defeat the Mandates rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. , 2022 (Courtesy Dr. Robert W. Malone)

Dr. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone at the Defeat the Mandates rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. , 2022 (Courtesy Dr. Robert W. Malone)

The coronavirus pandemic has been a revelation to many, not least to Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA technology platform used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines he vehemently opposes.

In a new book, "Lies My Gov't Told Me and the Better Future Coming." he recounts going from – in the eyes of establishment media and government – esteemed vaccine inventor to purveyor of "misinformation."

Malone sets the stage with an opening chapter intriguingly titled "How I Got Red-Pilled, and the Gradual Reveal."

In a video interview (embedded below) with WND, he recalled once being a devoted reader of The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine.

"There was a time when I believed what I was hearing from the Democratic Party. There was a time when I believed that the government was really focused on trying to do the right thing," he said. "I believed in the vaccine enterprise. I believed in public health. I believed in the CDC and the FDA – I was aware of a lot of the problems with the CDC, but I thought the FDA was truly committed to ensuring the safety of the public in food, drugs and health."

He devoted his career, he said, to learning and assimilating good practices and adhering to ethical standards.

"And then to see all these things just thrown right out the door, as if they're the trash, with no awareness of consequences."

When Malone began speaking what he believed to be the truth – he believes "time has validated pretty much all of what I have said" – he "encountered this weaponized information ecosystem of derision and lies and defamation and slander."

The book – written with his wife, Jill Glasspool Malone – includes chapters by other outspoken physician scientists, Drs. Meryl Nass, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory. And there's one by Ed Dowd, the former Wall Street analyst who has compiled evidence from the insurance and funeral industries, and government databases showing a spike in excess deaths corresponding to the rollout of the COVID mRNA vaccines.

Intentional communities
Over the past three years, Malone said, it's become clear that humanity is passing through a historic nexus point in which it is confronted with two visions for the future.

"They are almost polar opposites. One is a globally centralized, totalitarian, utilitarian, Marxist, command economy version of the world that is truly captured by this phrase 'you will own nothing and you will be happy,'" he told WND, referencing a tweet by the World Economic Forum.

The "contrapositive" to that vision, he continued, is "an organically arising world that is decentralized, that is still committed to nation states and more local control structures."

In his many travels around the world during the pandemic, he has observed the emergence of "intentional communities" based on faith or a shared endeavor, such as farming.

They are finding ways, he said, to work together and even connect globally "without the need for some autocratic, centralized control."

See the WND interview with Dr. Robert Malone:

WND is now on Trump's Truth Social! Follow us @WNDNews

EDITOR’S NOTE: Leftwing billionaire George Soros bankrolls everything evil – most recently the 75 pro-criminal “Soros district attorneys” who have transformed America’s most dynamic cities into degraded, crime-infested hellscapes of skyrocketing violent crime. Soros also funds drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders, globalism, Black Lives Matter, “defunding the police,” devaluing America's currency and destroying her sovereignty. But why?

Whistleblower magazine reveals and explores the stunning truth: Soros, an atheist, literally says he’s “some kind of god,” obsessed with re-creating the world in his image. Here are a few actual quotes from Soros: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood…” “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” “You know, in my personal capacity I’m not actually a selfless philanthropic person. I’ve very much self-centered.” “I am kind of a nut who wants to have an impact.” “Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad. … I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it.”

Except he hasn’t “escaped it.” Not only is Soros totally mad, but he’s imposing his insanity on America. See Soros and the leftwing world he has created and funded as never before in “THE BILLIONAIRE WHO THINKS HE’S ‘GOD’: Why George Soros is obsessed with destroying America.”

For 25 years, WND has boldly brought you the news that really matters. If you appreciate our Christian journalists and their uniquely truthful reporting and analysis, please help us by becoming a WND Insider!

Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.

SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!

The post WATCH: Dr. Robert Malone discloses in new book 'things I no longer believe' appeared first on WND.



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Massive ‘CitizenFreePress’ News Site Suspended from Musk’s Twitter for Sharing Video of Obama Admitting Election Machine Exploits.



The heavily-trafficked news aggregation site CitizenFreePress.com has been suspended from Twitter for sharing a clip of former President Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2008, discussing potential problems with American voting machines and demanding paper trails for ballots.

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You're Living In A World Wrought By The Federal Reserve. Notice Anything Wrong?

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You're Living In A World Wrought By The Federal Reserve. Notice Anything Wrong?

Authored by Lynn Parramore via The Institute for New Economic Thinking,

In her new book, veteran Wall Street watcher and economist Nomi Prins warns that central bank strategies deployed since the financial crisis are destroying the real economy, worsening inequality, and creating societal chaos.

Ever wonder why it is that for most of the 21st century, no matter who is in the White House, no matter the state of the economy, and regardless of what ordinary people are suffering, money travels inexorably to the top?

If you find this baffling, you’re not alone. For many, it seems that the further we travel into this acutely challenging century, the political, economic, and social rules we thought we understood increasingly fail to apply.

Economist, journalist, and former Wall Street exec Nomi Prins is here to explain the inexplicable. Her latest book, Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever, is a highly readable and clear account of how the financial realm, with its central bank-fueled loose money and mega-wealthy financiers, has split off from the real economy, the place inhabited by regular working people who buy stuff and produce things.

The upshot: the people’s needs are increasingly ignored in favor of market demands.

Prins points to the 2008 financial crisis and the Federal Reserve’s response as the pivotal moment in which we jumped on a tiger that we can no longer seem to dismount. What was supposed to be an emergency response to a crisis ended up turning into an unstoppable addiction to cheap money which, Prins argues, initiated a vicious cycle of pumped-up financial markets, destabilizing inequality, a public left worse off, and a political system increasingly unable to make real progress on long-term priorities like climate change. She spoke to the Institute for New Economic Thinking about who is responsible, what the public needs to understand, and why this tiger will not take us anywhere we want to go.

Lynn Parramore: You’ve written several books about the U.S. economy and Wall Street. Why this new book, focusing on central banks and their influence? Why is this so important to understand now?

Nomi Prins: Since the financial crisis, one of the themes in my books is money and power. There’s a real thru-line from my 2009 book, It Takes a Pillage, which focuses on the financial crisis, to All the President’s Bankers (2014), where I go back into the history of American bankers and their political influence, on up through Collusion (2018), the global analysis of what happened from the financial crisis through the period before the pandemic.

That thru-line concerns this external body - the central banks - which can effectively manufacture money, and how this money, just by sheer mass momentum and the players involved, goes disproportionately to financial markets relative to the real economy. This activity, in fact, is detrimental to the relationship between markets and the real economy, and also to the real economy itself.

I wrote Permanent Distortion because to me, the distortion that money and power have created between markets and the real economy did in fact become permanent. It’s not just something we’re experiencing now, and then can we go back to a more glorious time when it wasn’t like this. It was around July 2020, when we were all locked down and not knowing what was going on with our lives, our personal economies, our health, and our families, when I realized that the Federal Reserve had doubled the size – or even more so — of its book of assets. It had created about $5 trillion worth of money in a very short period of time.

During that time, the markets went from being very afraid and down to being very, very high. A lot of people said, well, we’re all at home using Zoom, so therefore the market just rebounded by so much. But that was just a small part of it. The bigger part was that money became available at such an immense level and therefore the distortion between where money goes in the financial markets and where it doesn’t go in the real economy became permanent. At that moment I saw that this can happen in any amount, at any time. There’s no restriction, no transparency, no responsibility.

LP: You make a strong case that high finance has become unhinged from the economy, and you go so far as to say it has become disconnected from capitalism itself. What exactly does that mean?

NP: When I’m talking about capitalism in that sense, I’m connecting it to the idea of financial markets supposedly being created to aggregate money in order to then funnel it into companies, and therefore into projects, and on into the real economy.

So the idea, technically, from a capital market perspective, is that borrowing money in order to do something, or selling bonds in order to finance something, or selling shares in order to finance something, used to have a particular relationship to each other. If there was a transparent use for a company that had value to shareholders, they would be willing to effectively invest their money in order for that company to do what it does to grow whatever it’s growing. Part of that use could be profits, part could be wages, part could be cars. The point being that the relationship was more or less (though not always) transparent at a theoretical level.

But now there is more money being thrown into the markets from an outside source. It’s not money from the actual profits of a company or its long-term strategy, or the productivity of workers, or the creation of long-term things. You end up getting an unmooring between what markets are theoretically there to do in a capitalist society and from a capital-raising standpoint. There’s this other source that comes in and kind of turbo-boosts and distorts all of those relationships.

LP: You place the roots of this trouble in 2008, a year which, you point out, increased the power of central banks. Yet, Ben Bernanke, the very economist in charge of the Fed at that time, just won the Nobel Prize. As some have pointed out, we are living in the world he created, and many hail him as the guy who prevented the second Great Depression. How did he contribute to the alarming picture you paint of an economic system gone off the rails?

NP: I thought the Nobel Prize for Bernanke was a bizarre choice, although it made sense if you believed the narrative that attributed to him the power to save the economy. And he also happened to have written a lot of things historically about depressions. But if you actually dig into both what he did and what he wrote to win that Nobel Prize, you find a concerning story. To understand it, you have to go back to before the crisis was apparent to everyone — both during the Great Depression and during the 2008 financial crisis.

Back before it became apparent that a financial crisis was happening, there was an immense amount of leverage in the banking system over which Bernanke had a responsibility to regulate. There was also an immense amount of assets being created off the back of a very small amount of interest coming in from subprime loans. Those subprime loans themselves had issues, and Bernanke knew it because the banks knew about the interest payments, and their rising delinquencies, and defaults. A small amount of subprime loans were structured to feed into a large amount of other assets by said banks. As this was happening, either he didn’t want to pay attention or he thought looming problems would just go away as many banks did. But Bernanke had information from the banking system in his position at the top of the Fed and certainly through his connection to the New York Fed. He was deeply connected to those banks and their liquidity and rising delinquency and default problems and he just chose to say that everything was effectively fine.

He did that even before the crisis became apparent. Then, in 2007, when things were absolutely crumbling and even the shares of real estate developers were plummeting, when there was so much information all over the place and reports from the FBI were going into the Fed telling them there were issues, what did Bernanke do? He did nothing.

So when the crisis did occur, Bernanke ultimately used the tool of quantitative easing, which is basically creating electronic money in return for taking out that debt from the market and putting it on the Fed’s books for safekeeping. He put it there and most of it stayed there. Later it manifested a larger crisis, or a looming crisis, by injecting all that money into the market on the auspices of saving the real economy.

What actually happened was the markets rose precipitously over all of the ensuing years. There’s one or two years where they wobbled a bit, but, in all the period of time during Bernanke’s chairmanship of the Fed, the real economy stumbled. To me, the narrative that he saved things from being worse is a false one. Yet that narrative was perpetuated and is still believed today by the majority of people who care to think about it, like the Nobel Committee, apparently.

And what about Bernanke’s writing on the Great Depression that he had done back in the day – as supposedly the main reason he got this prize? Well, he’s had an aura of having such great knowledge of the Great Depression. He was the man who wasn’t going to let it happen again. Yet he forgot, or didn’t recognize, that one of the reasons the central bank did what it did from 1929 to 1931, a time when many banks collapsed, is that there was a housing bubble. There was also overleverage and a situation where Wall Street banks had been doing nefarious things with money. So one of the reasons that the crash happened and so many banks went under afterward was because of what happened before. The banks had become over-extended, over-leveraged and Fed wasn’t paying attention at the time.

Bernanke didn’t write about this. He wrote about what happened when the Fed tightened too much too quickly and caused another leg of the Great Depression. That strategy was something he wasn’t going to have happen on his watch, but he forgot or didn’t pay attention to anything that had actually caused the crisis, to what led to Great Depression. He showed the same blind spot in his approach to the financial crisis. To me, that’s like two negatives, two false narratives. The consistency in those two false narratives is that they are both related to over-leverage in the housing market, to Wall Street taking advantage of it, and to the Fed not doing anything.

LP: Let’s talk for a moment about economists and economic advisers that influence our political system. What can you tell us about their relationship to power? Does it cause them to have these blind spots?

NP: The National Economic Council is generally made up of senior business leaders and bankers with current jobs, so a lot of them tend to lobby for certain policies that benefit them. In this last go-round, there’s been an oddly exorbitant amount of lobbying to the Fed directly. There are about 120 different lobby groups that lobby the Fed directly, even beyond lobbying respective politicians and on behalf of respective companies or sectors! So “the economy” is really convenient as a funnel for any policy that has to do with money going in and out of anywhere. If policies are being formulated or explained by self-interested people or people that work for self-interested companies or parties, then they’re going to be skewed toward those people or companies. You don’t have Joe the Plumber hanging out in the middle of the Economic Council saying well, here’s what’s going on with my building and my house, now what are you going to do about those? That’s not how it’s structured. It ensures a very top-heavy approach to economics.

Take, for example, how the Fed views statistics, such as employment numbers, when it’s thinking about inflation or raising rates so quickly, which is really constraining to people on an actual budget facing other inflationary pressures, and, by the way, not actually doing anything about inflation. They’ve got the Executive Survey and the Household Survey. The Executive Survey counts every single job somebody has as a job in the economy, even if it’s the same person, whereas the Household Survey only counts one job per human. So those numbers are disparate. There’s a lot that can be interpreted in different ways and the framework has been formulated, generally, by economists who accept certain narratives, who tend to confirm or to say what needs to be confirmed or said to keep the status quo. They’re the ones that remain in those advisory positions. You do get people who might try to push the envelope a bit in terms of definitions and policies, but they don’t tend to stay around.

LP: You note in your book that our whole society has become alarmingly top-heavy due to these top-heavy approaches. I was struck by the statistic that in a single year of the pandemic, 2020, there were 500 new billionaires created, just as regular people were losing their jobs, losing their health, and many were losing their lives.

NP: Yes, that statistic gets people’s attention. My other favorite is from the 2022 Oxfam report, which says that the top 10 billionaires were making $15,000 per second. When I do talks on the book, I make everybody imagine that, to think about the speed of what’s going on here. It’s because those billionaires are invested in markets that their wealth is propelling up so much. All the speculation, though, is driven by this excess amount of available money, by what the Fed has done.

LP: You refer to this as wealth accumulation without accountability. In what sense?

NP: If you’re participating in a market that’s going up, obviously the more you’re participating, whether as the head of a company that has options for stocks, or as an investor, or as the retail person who is placing just the little bit they have on it, then you’re going to benefit from that proportion of upside because you’re in it. If you’re not in it, you’re not going to benefit from the upside. That’s just the math.

What we’ve seen is actually more money created than what was sensibly needed to save the economy, and it’s obviously not going into the real economy. I’ve gone through the stats of the Fed’s books related to the $600 stimulus payments, the extra unemployment insurance, and even the PPP loans. The remaining money was leveraged into the financial system. What was on offer to the markets from the Fed dwarfs what actually went into the pockets of real people in the real economy.

As a result, the money just tsunamied upward in a very short period of time. That money unmoored from the real economy and did nothing for it. There were a lot of narratives flying around and guesswork on why the markets ballooned so quickly. What you didn’t have to guess was that trillions of dollars were created, not just by the US central bank, but by central banks around the world. And this was accumulated into the financial system and financial markets.

LP: How does this distortion impact our ability to confront long-term challenges, such as climate change?

NP: This goes back to the question of accountability. If money is being drawn into one place or one set of financial assets, the financial markets, it doesn’t go into preserving the social contracts or the Main Street economy or the fractures in Main Street economics. I think that as a result, government leaders of both parties get lazy about pushing through longer-term strategies. Because there is this external force of money, it distorts all of the decisions. Parties argue back and forth about where money should go where and so forth, but it distorts all that just that much further because of the ease with which money can be created and multiply and go elsewhere. The idea of long-term strategies, like fighting climate change, suffer.

Yes, we recently had a bipartisan infrastructure act passed, and that was positive (though it’s taking quite some time to actually agree on where that money’s going to go). But going back to what capitalism could be, what if that money that went to financial markets had gone to directly build solar or wind energy? Or the electrification of manufacturing plants? Or water purification?

If it could have gone to these areas more quickly, then you would see more of a shift. The pace of getting what’s needed to fight climate change would be faster if it weren’t way easier for money to flit about, especially when created in abundance, into areas where it can just multiply itself more easily rather than in awaiting to build a whole new production center and or new energy strategy. The fact that money can multiply so quickly in the markets makes it harder for it to stick around in one of those lasting areas —to build necessary, physical things, like new or upgraded power mechanisms.

LP: You write about developments in cryptocurrencies and the metaverse as responses to this distorted situation. How do you see them evolving in relation to it?

NP: When I wrote about crypto, I also wrote about decentralized finance. They’re not necessarily the same thing, though they do share commonalities in that Bitcoin, for example, was created off of blockchain technology, which has been around for decades. But let’s just focus on the fact that crypto grew exponentially in the wake of the financial crisis. That’s when the famous Bitcoin white paper came out. That’s when the idea of fighting against the bailing out of banks spurred this vision of having some way of financing, borrowing, lending, and keeping money outside of the auspices of the more centralized financial system, which had shown itself to be a) reliant on the Fed and the government and b) not particularly stable.

Even though we’ve got, obviously, centuries of the establishment of different currencies, including the dollar (with the dollar becoming stronger and the reserve currency in the last century), the idea that something else can compete on a currency basis, or at least be another avenue if it were to be regulated and safer, was a direct result of what happened and how it was handled by central banks in the wake of the financial crisis. It’s also why that idea grew exponentially again in the wake of the pandemic, when the same things happened. Instead of saving the economy by saving Wall Street, the idea was that the Fed was saving the economy by — we don’t even know what — but ultimately money gushed into the markets again. That was one thing. But the decentralized aspect of it is also an interesting area of transformation and will be for some time — the idea of using technology to do financial transactions of all kinds away from the auspices of your Chase account or your Bank of America account.

In terms of the metaverse, I’m not talking about gaming and that type of thing, but of using technology to share, more directly, things like medical treatments or surgery secrets or what have you, across countries without everybody physically being in the same place, or engineering techniques that can allow easier fabrication of potential problems in new bridges that could be ironed out before the bridge is actually built or engineered so that you have more efficiency in the use of material. This is about pushing technology into something helpful for the building of real things and the creation of better and healthier lives for people through the auspices of virtual reality techniques.

LP: Some of that sounds hopeful, yet you use the word “permanent” in the title of your book. It sounds like we have no way of correcting this distortion between the financial markets and the real economy.

NP: I chose the term “permanent” specifically. It’s a big word. Given what happened in the wake of the pandemic and the fact that central banks could create so much money so quickly facing a crisis showed me that this can happen again and again. Not necessarily that big of an amount for that big of a crisis, but that we would have this unhinged, uncapped, untransparent process that can occur repeatedly.

Since I wrote the book, we have this high inflationary environment. The Fed is raising rates quickly, as are other central banks around the world. I think that’s creating a looming debt crisis for consumers, in particular, in the process, with the cost of money becoming so high for them so quickly. We’re starting to see delinquencies, defaults, and other problems arising as a result.

But be that as it may, in the U.K, the Bank of England, when faced with a pension crisis recently, was “forced” — as described by articles associated with it — but actually chose to create 60 billion pounds worth of money in order to buy gilts [the equivalent of U.S. Treasury securities] and to give a bid to the gilt market to raise the level of gilts. They chose to do that because gilts were declining precipitously and over-leveraged by a contingent of the pension fund community. The idea was that, as with any pension fund, you invest and the return that you get on that investment is part of what the pensioners needing to draw on their pensions get. But when there’s too much borrowing or there’s too much of a depreciation in the assets, then there’s a problem. You can’t pay what is owed to the pensioners.

That’s what happened in the U.K. As a result, the central bank is still raising rates – tightening policy — and on the other hand, they’re creating more money — loosening policy — in order to buy those gilts. I think we’re going to continue to see these types of situations. That’s what I mean by permanent. There’s always going to be this possibility of money coming into some part of the market when it needs it because (particularly in developed countries) central banks can do that.

How do we get out of it? We can’t. First of all, it’s important to note that this is happening and not to accept false narratives, like the story that a host of $600 stimulus checks paid out two years ago is causing inflation today. That’s just really annoying and stupid. We need to understand that the Fed didn’t inflate money in order to pay people those $600 checks or help fund the PPP loans and whatever else was going on at the time. That’s not what’s causing our inflation. There’s a bigger picture. One of the things I think we can do is literally ask ourselves the question, do you think that this monetary body in Washington has the ability to do anything that can actually make my electricity bills go down by virtue of raising the cost of my credit card debt or my personal loans or my mortgage? The answer should be no. We need to understand and think about these relationships so that at least we don’t accept what’s false and we don’t become blind, to what’s going on. The public needs to know this. Congress should know this. That’s what I hope my book can do: educate people. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/19/2022 - 17:30

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