Tag Archives: Corruption

FTX and the Corruption of America, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

How long does a country last when crooks win and the honesty and integrity are punished? From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

What all the entrenched insiders in America’s parasitic, predatory elites and institutions don’t dare admit is that to protect themselves from consequence, we’ve had to sacrifice everything else.

Thanks to the FTX swindle, we now know the cost of a get out of jail free card in America: $40 million, paid to political elites. It seems even get out of jail free cards have suffered from inflation.

With hefty “donations” (heh) to elites, all wrong-doing is swept under a very capacious carpet. Jeffrey Epstein sprinkled a few million on the elites of Harvard, and he was ushered into this elite circle as an intimate pal. The fact that he was a rapacious predator of children was of no concern. A few million showered on the right people and causes makes evil and criminality disappear.

If a financier looter showers $40 million on “the right people,” mouths the “correct” phrases and issues empty promises to give away his looted billions, he becomes an instant golden boy of the right elites who have the power to protect him from consequences.

This is how America works now: in-your-face corruption is not just accepted, it’s glorified. Let’s score America’s wealth and power elites, regardless of party or political persuasion:

Integrity: zero.

Austerity: zero.

Restraint: zero.

Humility: zero.

Responsibility: zero.

Accountability: zero.

Sacrifice for the common good: zero.

Thrift: zero.

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‘Science for Hire,’ a Gary Null Production, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on November 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of rackets out there and the pharmaceutical one may be the biggest. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Video Link

Story at-a-glance

  • “Science for Hire,” produced by Gary Null, is a film that tackles some of the most critical scientific issues threatening the health and well-being of the U.S. public
  • Long-standing systemic corruption in medical organizations and medical schools, federal regulatory agencies and academic journals has led to a world where pseudoscience and misinformation rules
  • Elected officials and the media are captured by the highest bidder, and those who dare speak out against the establishment are attacked, their careers often destroyed in the process
  • The film covers a wide range of topics — from corruption at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — an arm of the National Institutes of Health — to the opioid epidemic
  • Set aside two hours to watch the film in its entirety for an eye-opening look at the dark side of the scientific, pharmaceutical and military industrial complexes

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I Used To Be Disgusted, Now I’m Disabused, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

Enlightenment, even when it’s painful, is almost always valuable. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

It’s certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective.

I used to be disgusted, now I’m disabused: beneath all the self-serving narratives, fad-memes and over-simplifications regurgitated as serious analysis, these are the core dynamics I see:

1. Imperial corruption of democracy and open markets. I described this in Regardless of Who’s Elected, Imperial Corruption Rules the Nation: the dynamic adaptive churn of unfettered representative democracy and open markets are anathema to insiders, vested interests and elites, each of which has gained asymmetric power by subverting democracy and markets to serve their private interests rather than the public interest / common good–phrases that are meaningless to insiders, vested interests and elites except as simulacra used for PR.

2. The Deep State, the unelected and unaccountable Administrative State. I’ve been discussing the Deep State before it entered common use–for example:

Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007)

The Dollar and the Deep State (February 24, 2014)

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

The Administrative State has existed in some form in every nation-state / empire, but the U.S. Deep State only gained its vast global powers in World War II and the Cold War, where the lesson learned was the public may choose unwisely (for example, choosing appeasement over preparation) and so the really important decisions needed to preserve the nation cannot be left to parochial politicos in elected office–those decisions must be in the hands of those who know what has to be done.

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Regardless of Who’s Elected, Imperial Corruption Rules the Nation, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

The government is a corruptocracy, but at least that’s non-partisan. Both parties are crooked. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

But in the meantime, enjoy the political theatrics down on the sand-strewn floor of the Coliseum.

While the much-touted differences between America’s political parties get obsessive, hysterical attention, the sameness of Imperial corruption, waste and squalor regardless of who’s in power gets little notice. Scrape away the differences–mostly in domestic issues–and we see the dead hand of Imperial Corruption is on the tiller.

The core of Imperial Corruption is the disconnect between the nation’s ideals of representational democracy and open markets and the sordid reality: elites serve their interests by corrupting both democracy and open markets.

Unfettered democracy and markets cannot be controlled by a tiny, self-serving elite. Stripped of corruption, democracy and markets are free-for-alls that are constantly evolving, as highly adaptive islands of coherence coalesce that influence the quasi-chaos, competing with other islands of coherence but never gaining dominance due to the open-ended dynamism of collaboration-competition that is the beating heart of both democracy and open markets.

The only way to control democracy and markets to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many is to corrupt them completely by destroying the dynamism of collaboration-competition. Democracy is replaced by an auction of political power to the highest bidder that rewards cronies and devotes all its resources not to solving the nation’s problems but to whipping up conflagrations of divisiveness and partisan hysteria that wash away the middle ground where problems can actually be addressed.

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The Case for Dismantling the FBI, by Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted on October 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

The FBI was a bad idea from the start. From Charles C. W. Cooke of The National Review at archive.ph:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) delivers an opening statement in Washington, D.C., December 11, 2019. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

The bureau is a violent, expansionist, self-aggrandizing, and careless outfit that sits awkwardly within the American constitutional order.

In the New York Times this week, Bret Stephens complained that, in unholy conjunction with the Department of Justice, the FBI had disgraced itself yet again with its public smear of Representative Matt Gaetz. “I don’t like Gaetz’s politics or persona any more than you do,” Stephens told a characteristically bewildered Gail Collins. “But what we seem to have here is a high-profile politician being convicted in the court of public opinion of some of the most heinous behavior imaginable—trafficking a minor for sex—until the Justice Department realizes two years late that its case has fallen apart.”

Which . . . well, yeah. That’s what the FBI is for. Last week, a whistleblower named Kyle Seraphin told the Washington Times that the FBI had adopted “an entirely ridiculous internal process for determining every single national priority.” One must ask: “ridiculous” from whose perspective? Relative to the FBI’s stated mission, its behavior does indeed look “ridiculous.” Relative to its historical conduct, its behavior seems pretty standard. What the FBI did to Matt Gaetz is precisely what it did to Donald Trump. And what it did to Donald Trump is what it’s been doing since it was founded: namely, spying on, or attempting to discredit, anyone who irritates the powers that be.

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Cynical defense of Hunter Biden: I was addicted to drugs, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on October 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

Drugs excuse everything, as long as you’re the son of the president. From Jonathan Turley at nypost.com:

Hunter and Joe Biden
The Biden family and the media have been cultivating the “addiction angle” for months as they they anticipated possible criminal charges against scandal-scarred first son Hunter. Getty Image

For years, President Biden repeated the same mantra when asked about Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and alleged crimes: “My son did nothing wrong.” It was always implausible — as was his denial of any knowledge of these dealings despite emails and pictures to the contrary.

So the president and the press have been shifting to a new defense. As the father recently insisted of his son, “He fought an addiction problem. He overcame it. He wrote about it.”

The family and the media have been cultivating the angle for months as they anticipated possible criminal charges. Such charges would not only be an embarrassment for the president but also the media, which have been actively complicit in covering up the multimillion-dollar influence-peddling schemes of the Biden family, including Hunter and his uncle James. With possible criminal conduct exposed, all that’s left is the addiction defense.

Hunter Biden’s autobiographical book laid the foundations for this final line of defense. While the book did not do particularly well in sales with the public, the media offered fawning interviews about his account of addiction. The narrative was ramped up by many of the same media outlets that buried the scandal, including articles on how the family fought “to keep him alive.”

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“Joe Biden’s” Last Stand, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on September 24, 2022 | 1 comment

“The shit has already hit the fan.” From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Historians of the future, grilling spatchcocked plovers over their campfires, will need not ponder for even a New York minute who started World War Three in the rockin’ 2020s. They will point straight to the waxy, furtive, larval figure known as “Joe Biden,” by then judged a moral weevil of such epic low degree that he became an embarrassment to all the other sewer-dwelling denizens of the dank DC underworld, including the roaches, the rats, the humble shipworms eating through sunk oaken foundations of buildings long forgotten, the writhing maggots rinsed from a thousand restaurant dumpsters, the slithering hellgrammites, millipedes, silverfish, pillbugs, termites, dung-beetles, woodlice, and, not least, the scaly lawyers spawned out of the infestation beneath K Street called Perkins Coie LLP. Even these would loathe and disdain the thing that came into this world as “Joe Biden.”

Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project. They engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr. Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia, Russia!

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Government, Politics, Propaganda

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The Historic Collapse of Journalism, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on September 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

There was a time when journalists weren’t just shills for the establishment. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters. Conformity matters, writes Patrick Lawrence.

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

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Fauci’s COVID Disaster: A Summary, by Ian Miller

Posted on August 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

How did Fauci screw up? Let us count the ways. From Ian Miller at brownstone.org:

News that Dr. Anthony Fauci is finally leaving his post after what seemed like an endless reign at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases should be a time for celebration.

But it’s not.

Fauci has caused such tremendous damage throughout the past few years that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

In nearly every area of life in the United States, as well as in many other parts of the world, Fauci’s influence has been a key contributor to massive amounts of human suffering.

Fauci inexplicably had particular ire for children.

Long after it was abundantly clear that closing schools had no significant health benefit, Fauci continued to support shutdowns and restrictions on normal life for millions of children at little to no risk from the virus.

His capacity for outright political advocacy and activism has been breathtaking to behold and contributed to the extreme collapse of trust in public health “experts” and authorities.

So it seems worth revisiting some of the greatest hits of Fauci’s reign of incompetence.

Unmasked is entirely reader supported. Paid subscriptions allow the work to continue in this format, and any readership is greatly appreciated.

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The Planned Plunder of Ukraine, by Eamon McKinney

Posted on August 26, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. government and its cohorts plan to strip mine Ukraine just as they did with Russia. From Eamon McKinney at strategic-culture.org:

It is now some five months since Russia embarked on its offensive to liberate the people of the Eastern Ukraine. At the outset, the outpouring of love and compassion for the Ukraine from the collective West was heartwarming. The mainstream media, fresh off their genocidal Covid complicity moved into high gear. Russophobia on steroids was the “new thing”. All things Russian had to banned and of course, Putin was the new Hitler. The blogosphere was alight with a new topic with which the great and good could virtue signal their way into heaven. Ukrainian flags were seemingly everywhere and blue and yellow became the fashion item de jour. Western leaders were barging each other out of the way to decry Russia and proclaim their undying love and support for the Ukrainian people. Of course, not all the Ukrainians, not the Russian speakers in the East who had been bombed and murdered relentlessly for the previous eight years, just the recently inconvenienced citizens who didn’t speak Russian. This selective compassion was on full display as all the Western puppet politicians went into full tough guy mode to try and look strong for an electorate that post Covid already widely despised them.

This Western love affair was alas all too brief for the Globalists, they had spent eight years trying to provoke Russia into an offensive. While the Western Governments continued to proclaim their support for the Puppet Zelensky, the people of the West quickly cooled in their affections. Perhaps it was the realisation that they had once again been lied to and that the conflict didn’t begin in February, but had in fact been going on for eight years. Maybe it was because they realised that the war was being fought by Ukrainian Neo-Nazi’s who were committing unspeakable atrocities on the people. Or maybe the knowledge that the Ukraine wasn’t in fact a democracy, but a violent oppressive regime that suppressed democracy. Alas, more likely it is because they are beginning to understand who will pay the price for the war, them.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, War

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