Category Archives: Cronyism

Social Media Coordination Between DOJ And FBI Is Not Limited To Twitter: Devin Nunes

Posted on December 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

If Twitter is a government tool, is there any doubt that the rest of the Big Tech social media zoo are as well? From Katie Spence at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com;

The social media coordination between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI isn’t limited to Twitter, former Congressman and current CEO of President Trump’s Truth Social, Devin Nunes, alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (C), FBI Director Christopher Wray (R) and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco hold a press conference at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington on Oct. 24, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The Twitter Files, a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, confirmed what many Conservatives have alleged for years. Namely, Twitter was shadow-banning accounts that didn’t fit a specific ideology and suspending accounts that bucked the chosen political narrative, Nunes claimed.

The Twitter logo and a photo of Elon Musk are displayed through a magnifier in this illustration taken on Oct. 27, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

But, the most concerning revelation in the Twitter Files, according to Nunes, is that the DOJ and the FBI had informants—whether paid or volunteers—that put forward a specific directive to Twitter, and that is likely happening on other social media platforms.

“The coordination that the Department of Justice and the FBI clearly had with Twitter? I don’t think it stops there,” Nunes stated.

“It seems like they were either running informants, or had paid informants, or had volunteers, where they were actively sending information on behalf of the government on who to look into, or who to ban, and that sort of thing.

“The bigger issue is, Twitter is one thing, but what about Facebook? What about Instagram?”

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Crime, Cronyism, Government, Media, Politics

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Will the Fallout from “Qatargate” (and now also “Moroccogate”) Splatter the European Commission? By Nick Corbishley

Posted on December 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

Who would think that a group of unaccountable bureaucrats with enormous powers and budgets would be susceptible to corruption? It’s shocking! Shocking! From Nick Corbishley at nakedcapitalism.com:

As the Qatargate scandal widens, questions are being asked as to whether its reverberations will reach the Commission, the EU’s executive branch. Recent revelations suggest the EU’s Chief Diplomat Josep Borrell could be implicated.

Since erupting last weekend with police raids on MEPs’ homes and offices in the European parliament, the Qatargate scandal has done nothing but mushroom. What began as a criminal probe into current and former MEPs and parliamentary assistants implicated in a bribery ring aimed at burnishing the public image of the current World Cup host has widened significantly — not only in terms of the number of people involved but also the number of organizations and third countries, which now also include Morocco.

As the scandal grows, both the Parliament and the European Commission are locked in a frantic damage control mission. European Parliament president Roberta Metsola on Thursday (15 December) pledged to unveil a “wide-ranging reform package” in January, which will include  measures to bolster whistleblower protections, a ban on all unofficial parliamentary friendship groups (groups of MEPs discussing relations with non-EU countries) and a review of enforcement of code of conduct rules for MEPs.

Fallout Spreads

For the moment almost all of the focus is understandably on the European Parliament, but questions are beginning to be asked as to whether the fallout will spread to the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission. Asked whether he is worried about such an outcome, Didier Reynders, the EU Commissioner for justice, told Politico that it is “all the time a possibility”.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Governments, Investigations, Law, Morality, Politics, Propaganda

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The Four Fuckeries, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

Call them the four horsemen of America’s downfall. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meier

I doubt there is another era in the history of Western Civ when the forces in-motion acting on society were so mystifying to those acted upon. And isn’t it especially galling that this is so in an age after rational scientific practice had decoded so many of nature’s secrets? Did that project somehow fail in the end? Has the Enlightenment been defeated? How have we become trapped like frogs being boiled haplessly in our own pond-water?

I have reduced these forces to four obvious streams of the sheerest seemingly evil fuckery, which is to say nefariously managed events meant to harm us. They are surely all related in some way. Let’s try to de-mystify them to understand what we’re up against.

First: Covid-19. How is it that we don’t know for sure how this organism came into the world, or understand what ensued after it did? Answer: the people who caused it to happen in the Wuhan lab have been busy covering their asses for three years, and successfully so. Yet we know exactly what Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric and others did. The paper trail in correspondence and patents alone is clear. We just can’t seem to do anything about it.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Financial markets, Government, Horseshit, Media, Morality, Politics, Tyranny

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The Solemn Stillness Before Winter, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

All sorts of shit looks ready to hit the fan this winter. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“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

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 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.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Debt, Economy, Government, Law, Media, Morality, Politics, Propaganda

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A Smoldering Fuse, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

The FTX affair is a hideous monstrosity, which means Sam Bankman-Fried has to be deeply in bed with multiple governments. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

We have pretty much burned our bridges at this point. Unless you’re prepared to mindfuck yourself, and gaslight yourself, and confess, and convert, there’s no going back to “normal” society (which we couldn’t go back to anyway, on account of how it doesn’t exist anymore) — CJ Hopkins

Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).

It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.

Against this backdrop, the USA enters a holiday season near-death spiral as unspooling scandals battle a collapsing economy for supremacy of the alt news sites. Case-in-point: the aforementioned FTX monkey business, a metastasizing tumor of the body politic. This complex fraud will smolder for a few weeks before it explodes into an extinction-grade event for the Democratic Party. The usual suspects among the mainstream media are trying strenuously to ignore it, but the shreds of this exploding money-borg are already sticking to guilty parties far and wide across the political landscape like so much rotting flesh.

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House Republicans Offer Preview Of Upcoming Investigations In Scathing Indictment Of DOJ, FBI, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 8, 2022 | 1 comment

Hope springs eternal that someday somebody will conduct an honest investigation that actually leads to someone’s incarceration. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee released a massive report on Friday detailing whistleblower disclosures about the politicization of the Justice Department (DOJ) and FBI under Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

According to the report, Garland has been a “willing participant of the Biden Admin’s weaponization of law enforcement,” while the FBI has “abused its law-enforcement authorities for apparently political purposes.”

What followed was a laundry list of incidents and whistleblower reports illustrating how politicized federal law enforcement has become.

What’s more, the report shows that the FBI has been inflating domestic extremism figures to fit an agenda.

One of the most significant findings of the report showed that the FBI has been encouraging its agents to artificially inflate the number of domestic violent extremism (DVE) incidents.

For years, Democrats—including President Joe Biden—have claimed that DVE events comprise one of the largest threats to American national security. Specifically, Democrats have blamed conservatives and “white supremacists” for most such incidents.

During the 116th Congress, Democrats even went so far as to propose a bill that would substantially bolster DOJ resources to combat DVE. –Epoch Times

“White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States,” reads the bill.

According to the whistleblowers, however, “FBI leadership is pressuring line agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism even if the matter does not meet the criteria.”

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Government, Intelligence, Investigations, Law

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Thieves Paradise in Kiev – IMF Admits It Doesn’t Know How Much Ukraine Has Received of $35 Billion in Promised Foreign Cash, Or Where the Money Was Spent, by John Helmer

Posted on November 4, 2022 | 1 comment

Who knew that the country that consistently ranks as the most corrupt in Europe would turn out to be an unaccountable money pit? From John Helmer at johnhelmer.net:

A new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that the Ukraine has become a thieves’ paradise  in which  corporate loan defaults are written off;  embezzlement from banks is not traced;   the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) no longer audits the country’s bank liabilities and reserves;  and the IMF admits it cannot tell how much of the $35 billion in foreign cash grants and loans promised to Kiev has been disbursed, or to whom.

“Disbursements of all committed funds over the remaining months of the year is urgently needed and will make a difference,” declares Kristalina Georgieva (lead image), the IMF Managing director since 2019, “especially in light of the recent horrific damage to energy infrastructure.”  Georgieva was speaking in Berlin on October 25.

“In a best-case scenario,” she added, “we estimate that Ukraine’s financing needs would be about $3 billion per month. When we incorporate some additional financing for higher gas imports and some repair of critical infrastructure, we quickly reach $4 billion per month. The recent missile attacks, which have clearly caused much more damage, not only confirms the validity of these estimates but leads us to consider $5 billion upper range.”

However, in a 32-page IMF staff report    on the state of Ukrainian budget finance and the risk of system-wide financial collapse, the Fund experts  have concluded that “large-scale forbearance with a delayed recognition of NPLs [commercial bank non-performing loans] and the suspension of NBU enforcement actions and audits of financial statements make a comprehensive assessment of the impact of the war difficult and uncertain.” The report has been released at this link on the IMF website.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Chaos Is As Chaos Does, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on October 24, 2022 | 1 comment

Garbage in, garbage out; the consequence of chaotic thinking is chaos. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

When this future becomes the present, that present will look obvious. It always does. And from that present, this past we are living in will look ridiculous…. — Curtis Yarvin

It’s hard to escape the awful feeling that Western Civ has a death wish, or to say which of its constituent nations wants to get to the graveyard first. Great Britain might be leading the pack with its Three-Card-Monte financial finagling economy and hot potato political leadership. Old Blighty sinks visibly by the day into sclerotic torpor — even while its MI-6 intel gang works overtime scheming to blow things up, to make the Russia-Ukraine mess even worse. Newly-tapped Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces the same set of quandaries that sank Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and his country will have to call a painful general election before long to make its government legitimate. Oh, to be a fly-on-the-wall at the first meeting between Mr. Sunak and King Charles.

Germany took a wrecking bar to its own economy this summer while its people kept goose-stepping to the absurd Covid “vaccine” tyranny narrative. The German gene for obedience marches them into their third national calamity in a hundred-odd years, with hardly a peep of political objection. Yet, deep inside them lurks that age-old Teutonic libido for violence. When will that break against the feckless head-of-state Olaf Scholz, with all the charisma of a Dampfnudel?

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Economy, Energy, Government, Law, Politics

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Weaponized Governmental Failure: A Primer, by Scott McKay

Posted on October 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

Democratic politicians would rather be the captains of garbage scows than passengers on luxury liners. From Scott McKay at spectator.org:

Editor’s Note: The following contains an excerpt from Scott McKay’s book The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win the Next American Era. It discusses a key concept which has appeared in several of his more recent columns to describe the decline of America’s cities.

With the 2022 midterm elections less than three weeks away and the alarming dysfunction of urban areas run by Democrats contributing in large measure to the public’s unease as expressed in countless right track/wrong track surveys, Scott says nothing about any of this is accidental.

*****

Let’s call it Weaponized Governmental Failure. It’s the single most explicative factor in the breakdown of American political consensus in the 21st century, even though it’s been around since the latter part of the 20th century.

The simple definition of Weaponized Governmental Failure is this: it’s the deliberate refusal to perform the basic tasks of urban governance for a specific political purpose.

The crime and the graft and the potholes and the bad drainage, not to mention the spotty trash collection or nonexistent snow shoveling, aren’t incompetence. In fact, none of what you see in the American public sector is incompetence. The people responsible for it are quite highly educated and well-trained in their craft. You just need to understand what their craft is.

It’s a choice to do a poor job with the more mundane tasks of running a city, and an educated and purposeful choice at that. If you do those things effectively, after all, what you will get is middle-class voters moving in. Middle-class voters tend to choose to live in places where they can expect to get actual value out of their tax dollars — good roads, safe streets, functional drainage, decent schools, a friendly business climate, and a growing economy, among other things — and those things are hard to produce when you govern the way the Left does.

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Free markets’ last stand, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on October 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

There’s a chance that parts of world may shift to free market models . . . but only after present models collapse and are completely discredited. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

The British government’s desperate dash towards free markets has failed, badly bungled. The establishment in Whitehall and Westminster is back and realigned with the international government consensus. The socialist wealth redistributors, the interventionists, and the anti-Brexit Remainers now formulate government policy. In Britain, free markets are dead. 

Citizens of other western nations should take note of these developments. The replacement of Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Jeremy Hunt, an establishment man and deemed to be a safe pair of hands, is set to guarantee the continuing authority of the state over its electors. The underlying problem, that the electorate can no longer afford its government, is lost in the noise.

We must abandon any hope of a reversal of rapacious government policies that continually strip electors of their freedom and personal wealth. With a rapidly approaching financial crisis, which is now widely expected, the UK government will double down on its anti-market, anti-sound money policies. We can expect more price subsidies and price controls — paid for, of course, by yet more currency debasement.

It’s not just the UK. All advanced economies are approaching an endpoint in their governments’ anti-market policies. The global status quo can now only be challenged by markets. Rising interest rates, driven by collapsing purchasing powers of the major fiat currencies are bringing on that challenge, triggering a global financial and currency crisis. 

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Posted in Banking, Business, Crime, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt

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