Category Archives: Cronyism

Gavin Newsom’s Wife Accused Of Profiting From ‘Gender Justice’ Films For Schoolchildren, by Lear Zhou

Posted on February 26, 2023 | Leave a comment

Nothing like keeping the State of California’s business in the family. From Lear Zhou at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, has been criticized for allegedly making a profit by screening her “gender justice” films to public school children.

The scrutiny comes from a nonpartisan government watchdog group called Open the Books, which claimed that “Siebel Newsom spent years laying the ideological groundwork and political infrastructure to support her policy ambitions,” in a research report published on Feb. 13.

CEO and founder of Open the Books Adam Andrzejewski told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, that his organization found out about Siebel Newsom’s alleged scheme by “following the money.”

Andrzejewski said they followed it “right into the governor’s wife’s … public charity, which is a film and curriculum nonprofit organization that licenses her films and curriculum to public schools across the country and in the state of California.”

The First Lady of California’s nonprofit organization “The Representation Project” was founded in 2011. It has produced four films, all advocating for gender or racial justice.

Siebel Newsom is the producer and director of the films. Andrzejewski said the secret is that “she hires her for-profit film production company to contract with her nonprofit film distribution company.”

Siebel Newsom’s for-profit company, Girls Club Entertainment, has received $1.6 million from The Representation Project since 2012, the report stated.

She also earned $1.5 million in salary from the nonprofit company from 2013 to 2021, which means she has personally received $3 million in profit, according to Andrzejewski.

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Earthquake Unveils Turkey’s Many Ugly Faces, by Burak Bekdil

Posted on February 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

Tragedy often brings out the worst in governments. From Burak Bekdil at gatestoneinstitute.org:

The worst disaster in modern Turkey’s history, the earthquake killed, as of February 15, more than 35,000 people and injured 100,000. The death toll will likely reach 40,000 or more. According to one estimate, the quake will result in $84 billion in economic losses to Turkey, more than 10% of gross domestic product.

It was not the quake that killed tens of thousands, but politics and suicidal profit-maximization behavior on individual level.

[I]n the aftermath of the 1999 quake, Erdoğan said: “What broke here is not the fault line … It is [the state’s] sense of shame. This is [the result of] poor building planning and stealing from construction materials.” Now that he is in power, Erdoğan explains that the loss of life in this month’s earthquake was (God’s) fate.

As part of his election campaign in 2018, Erdoğan granted “amnesty” to 7.4 million applications for unregulated buildings in return for fees, of which his government collected more than $13 billion.

More than 10,000 buildings were destroyed in the latest earthquake.

With the amnesty, contractors were allowed to skip crucial safety regulations, increasing their profits but putting residents at risk. Few buyers and tenants could guess that those permits would be their death certificates.

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Spartacast 07, by Spartacus

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Focus on the real enemy and forget the divisive divisions that enemy tries to foment. From Spartacus at iceni.substack.com:

With every day that passes that we don’t have justice, I get angrier, and so should you

Hey guys, Spartacus here, for a seventh Spartacast.

The documentary, COVID-19: The Biodefense Mafia, has been out for over a week. In that time, it has had over 13,000 hits on Rumble. That’s good, but honestly, I feel like it needs more. This information needs to be seen by as many people as possible. I’ve gone to the press with this, and except for ZeroHedge, and fellow alternative media bloggers, all I get is a wall of silence. That should tell you something.

People are stuck on the question of the Lab Leak. Did COVID come from an animal? Did it come from a laboratory? Nobody seems to have a definitive answer, a real smoking gun they can point to, aside from the fact that SARS-CoV-2 Spike has some very strange inserts in its sequence, such as the Furin cleavage site, the gp120-like insert, the superantigenic region, and the fact that it binds bacterial lipopolysaccharides and may boost the inflammatory effect of bacteria in a symbiotic way, and aside from how SARS-CoV-2 contains a sequence that’s found in a Moderna patent, and aside from the years of coverups, conflicts of interest, and gaslighting from all parties involved, nope, there’s no one piece of evidence that we can point to that says definitively that it came from a lab.

But that’s just it. We don’t need to.

I feel that people are getting bogged down with lingering questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The actual picture of what happened here is much broader than that, and it involves decades of increased US DOD spending on biolabs and biodefense, absent any real oversight or scrutiny. In fact, the one watchdog group digging into these biolabs, the Sunshine Project, was forced to close because they ran out of money. In retrospect, of course they ran out of money. It’s not in the interest of wealthy donors to donate to causes that run counter to their psychopathic Neo-Malthusian dreams of depopulating the planet with viruses.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Government, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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Beholding the Beholders: Hunter Biden’s Art Dealer Defies the House Over Business Records, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on February 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

Who are the art lovers buying Hunter Biden’s masterpieces? From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

It appears that Hunter Biden’s art dealer believes that his art should be left entirely to the eye of the beholder — and not Congress. Georges Bergès reportedly refused last week to provide the House Oversight Committee with the identities of the buyers of Biden’s high-priced art work. While counsel William Pittard insists that the list of purchasers must remain secret, it is hard to see the viable legal basis to refuse the demand of the House Oversight Committee, if made subject to a congressional subpoena.

The Biden sales have long been a subject of intense debate over whether it is another form of influence peddling or money laundering. Even President Barack Obama’s ethics head has raised objections.

Former Obama-era ethics official Walter Shaub called the art sale a “terrible idea” and noted that “it just is implausible that this art from an unknown artist would be selling at this price if it didn’t have the Biden name attached to it.”

As a new artist, Biden is fetching prices that exceed the prices of some Picassos. The quality of the work will be left to others to debate, but the Oversight Committee has a legitimate interest in looking into whether the art is being used to funnel money to the family of President Joe Biden.

In January, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) requested that Bergès testify before Congress. Comer has long alleged that Chinese buyers are behind the sales, though there is no public proof to support that allegation. He has stated that “arrangement with Hunter Biden raises serious ethical concerns and calls into question whether the Biden family is again selling access and influence.”

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When the Private Sector Is the Enemy, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Large corporations are fully on board with statism. From Ryan McMaken at lewrockwell.com:

Last Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee meeting provided some much-needed insight into how corporate personnel at Twitter (before Elon Musk’s takeover) had essentially turned the company into an adjunct of the federal government and its intelligence agencies.

Present to testify were high-ranking company personnel who oversaw Twitter during the covid panic and in the early days of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. Specifically, they were former employees Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and Vijaya Gadde. All three had titles with words like “trust” and “safety” in them. There was also James Baker, a former Twitter attorney and a former FBI agent who promoted the now-disproven “Russiagate” theory. It was clear from their testimony that all four saw themselves as righteous arbiters of truth and that anyone who disagreed with their views was guilty of “misinformation.” Conveniently, this “misinformation” overwhelmingly tended to coincide with these employees’ personal political views.

In practice, however, these keepers of “trust” and “safety” did not function as disinterested fact-checkers, journalists, or stewards of any kind. They certainly weren’t entrepreneurs focused on delivering the highest value for their owners. Rather, they were acting as extensions of the US administrative state, the FBI, and the Democratic Party.

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U.S. Government Sold Your Right to Jury Trial — to Insulate Big Pharma From Liability, by William Spruance

Posted on February 12, 2023 | 1 comment

The government pays big pharma for their products and shields them from liability when those products harm people. It’s the perfect business model for executives and shareholders without a shred of conscience. From William Spruance at childrenshealthdefense.org:

The federal government sold the Seventh Amendment, designed to protect your right to a jury trial, to the largest lobbying force in the country: Big Pharma.

On Feb. 24, 1985, The New York Times published “Glory Days End for Pharmaceuticals.” The article cited growing competition and legal liabilities as signs that “the big drug companies have suddenly found themselves mired in the same sort of troubles that have plagued less-glamorous industries for years.”

“Inevitably some [companies] will face staggering liabilities and lengthy court cases on approved drugs that later turn into flops,” journalist Winston Williams wrote.

Of course, the glory days did not end for Big Pharma.

From 2000 to 2018, 35 pharmaceutical companies reported cumulative revenue of $11.5 trillion. A study found that this was “significantly greater than other larger, public companies in the same time frame.”

Pfizer’s annual revenue jumped from $3.8 billion in 1984 to a record $100 billion in 2022. The company’s COVID-19 products, including its vaccine and Paxlovid accounted for $57 billion of that income.

The U.S. Government provided a steady stream of taxpayer dollars for Big Pharma’s revenue and shielded the benefiting companies from the cost of litigation.

Federal purchases of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have totaled more than $25 billion. The government paid Moderna $2.5 billion of taxpayer funds to develop the vaccine, and President Biden called on local leaders to use public money to bribe citizens to get the shots.

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Posted in Business, Cronyism, Government, Law, Medicine, Uncategorized

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Bill Gates Makes 10x Investment on mRNA Vaccines, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on February 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

Selfless saint Bill Gates had to settle for only a 10X return on his mRNA vaccine investment. It’s ugly for the rest of us when crony capitalism and medical totalitarianism crawl into bed together. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

  • In 2019, Bill Gates invested $55 million in BioNtech, which developed the COVID-19 shot for Pfizer; it’s now worth $550 million
  • Gates sold some of the stock at the end of 2022, when the share price was over $300
  • After reaping huge profits, Gates criticized COVID-19 jabs, stating they don’t block infection, aren’t effective against variants and have “very short duration”
  • Gates’ motivations run far deeper than making money off shrewd investments; by funding WHO, Gates is able to ensure that the decisions it makes end up profiting his own interests and those of his Big Pharma partners
  • Gates, via collaborations with WHO, Anthony Fauci and others, is aiming to have absolute power to control pandemic declarations and responses worldwide

In The Hill video above, Bill Gates trashes mRNA COVID-19 shots, naming three problems with them that need to be fixed. “The current vaccines are not infection-blocking,” Gates says, “They’re not broad — so when new variants come up you lose protection — and they have very short duration, particularly in the people who matter, which are old people.”1

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The Long-Term Negative Effects Of ESG Will Be Catastrophic, by Tom Czitron

Posted on February 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

ESG has evolved into fascism—a government-business partnership. From Tom Czitron at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has been a hotly debated topic over the last few years. The seemingly unquestioned march towards corporate utopia has met with resistance among those who oppose the idea that government oligarchs should dictate the affairs of private business firms. The long-term effects of the ESG movement are largely ignored by the mainstream.

ESG is largely justified on the basis that corporations and financial institutions should be socially responsible. They should work obsessively to address the perceived menaces of climate change, racism, sexism, and a host of subjects. Our benevolent political and economic elite define what is virtuous and what is not for a grateful public.

Corporations are compelled to enact policies that will reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, eliminate perceived negative economic outcomes against aggrieved groups, and be “sustainable,” as well as other virtuous goals. It matters little to the “select group of human beings,” as John Kerry called them, who are tasked with “saving the planet” that many of their solutions to these existential challenges are far more harmful than their worst-case scenarios.

The Friedman Doctrine, named after the eminent Chicago School economist, states that the sole responsibility of businesses is to maximize long-term shareholder value. I was exposed to this view in 1980 when I attended the University of Toronto’s Master of Business Administration program. I was surprised by the moral certainty and simplicity implied by the statement.

I remember our professor being challenged by my class on two fronts. One was the issue of charitable donations. That argument was quickly dispatched when it was pointed out that corporate CEO’s had no moral right to give away shareholders’ money. It was not theirs to give. If the benevolent CEO wanted to make charitable donations out of his own pocket he was free to do so. Shareholders had this same ability.

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Posted in Business, Cronyism, Economics, Economy, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

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How One Ukrainian Billionaire Funded Hunter Biden, Volodymyr Zelensky, And The Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, by Kenekoa the Great

Posted on February 3, 2023 | 1 comment

This guy sounds like a true philanthropist, giving to all sorts of worthy causes. From Kenekoa the Great at kenekoa.substack.com:

Is this why Hunter Biden’s laptop talks about “Children Burned Alive” in Ukraine?

Kolomoysky Owns Burisma Holdings

The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”

Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later, on May 12, 2014.

A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.

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Joe Biden Is Curiously Serving Two Masters, Which Has Me Wondering, by Rob Smith

Posted on January 29, 2023 | Leave a comment

Who is Joe Biden working for? The Chinese? From Rob Smith at realclearwire.com:

Joe Biden Is Curiously Serving Two Masters, Which Has Me Wondering

President Biden (@potus) on Twitter Office of President Joe Biden

Here is something you won’t hear anywhere else. It is clear that Joe Biden is being ratted out in the classified document scandal, but by whom? Tucker Carlson is convinced it is a cabal of Democratic Party members who want a new presidential nominee for 2024. Tucker, I love ya, but I don’t think so. I believe foreign actors and their interests  may be involved.

Joe Biden has been in politics for 50 years. He’s never had a real job. The only core conviction he has is the self-aggrandizement that comes from being able to have people suck up to him due to the power and vast resources at his disposal. He’s dumber than a doorknob. Yet, with 50 years of experience, he is on automatic pilot when it comes to self-preservation. He simply does what he is told and reads his teleprompter without really knowing what he is reading. Thus, I don’t buy Tucker’s analysis because the “powers that be” controlling him already have a pretty good gig. Why would they want to dump him?

I have great respect for anybody who risks his own money creating a product or service that others want to buy, whether it is a plumber growing his business or a software engineer creating the next new gizmo that charms Menlo Park. But people who sell influence and access to American politicians are despicable.  The conspiring politicians are sewer rats. They are fiduciaries of your money, and they use their access to your money to grant favors to others so they will have the benefit of your money and in return they enrich themselves. The nation’s interests take second fiddle to their interests. Yet, the pernicious, indeed the treasonous element of all this is when they sell influence to foreign actors, bad people in charge of powerful governments that are hostile to the United States. It is sick. It is despicable. It is treasonous.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Politics

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