At COP29, Officials Want To ‘Trump-Proof’ Their Green Funding With Global Climate Tax
By Nick Pope | Climate Change Dispatch | November 21, 2024
Foreign government officials attending the ongoing U.N. climate change summit are advocating for de facto global climate taxes to fund green energy development in poor countries ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to Financial Times. [emphasis, links added]
Officials from countries including France, Spain, and Kenya are pushing to plan so-called “solidarity levies” on various industries at this year’s conference so that a more developed version of the scheme can be presented at next year’s get-together in Brazil, FT reported.
The idea is to settle on a plan that would raise $100 billion or more annually to fund climate-related efforts in developing countries by imposing de facto taxes on the shipping and aviation industries, and possibly other sectors as well.
Past discussions on the issue of providing climate cash to poor nations have been fraught, and Trump — who pulled out of the U.N.’s Paris Climate Agreement in his first term and is primed to do so again — generally opposes routing money to other countries in the name of climate change, so attendees at this year’s summit are getting creative about finding sources of funding, according to FT.
Besides the shipping and aviation industries, cryptocurrency trades, fossil fuel production, plastic producers, billionaires, and financial transactions could possibly be subject to the “solidarity levies” scheme.
In fact, it is not even clear that the funding generated by the “solidarity levies” would even go directly to poor countries, as officials from some nations have suggested that the money should go to the shipping industry to help it with its decarbonization push, according to FT.
The shipping industry’s commitment to cutting emissions is putting more pressure on the aviation industry, which is itself pointing to the oil and gas industry to cough up more money.
Many major airline companies are already party to a global carbon offset pact reached in 2016, but that system is not meant to generate revenues that can then be repurposed, according to FT.
The task force assessing the “solidarity levies” concept is eyeing options for building upon duties on plane tickets already in place in 21 countries, which they think could raise as much as $164 billion annually.
Six Simple Steps to Pharma Reform
By Clayton J. Baker, MD | Brownstone Institute | November 20, 2024
The recent United States elections may have finally produced an administration that is willing – even eager – to reform the Big Pharma juggernaut that has thoroughly dominated life in the United States since Covid. But how might we achieve meaningful, definitive Pharma reform?
Simple.
Before we continue, please allow me to highlight the difference between “simple” and “easy.” Just because something is simple doesn’t make it easy. Lifting a 10-ton weight is no more complicated than lifting a 10-pound weight. But it’s a lot harder to do.
The task of reforming Big Pharma will not be easy. Talk about a heavy lift! Consider that before the 2020 election, the pharmaceutical industry donated funds to 72 senators and 302 members of the House of Representatives. Pfizer alone contributed to 228 lawmakers. At this moment, Big Pharma may be down, but it’s not out. The industry has too much power, money, and influence to be brought under control without a major struggle.
While not easy, should the political will be mustered, the process of breaking the stranglehold Big Pharma has on us would be surprisingly simple. Six changes in Federal law – four repeals of existing law, and two new pieces of legislation – would go a long way toward reining in and even reforming Big Pharma.
From the 1970s onward, US Federal policy consistently trended toward the empowerment and enrichment of the pharmaceutical industry. Since 1980, a series of Federal laws were enacted that created perverse incentives and promoted the rapacious behavior that has characterized Big Pharma over the past several decades, climaxing with the pandemic totalitarianism of the Covid era.
Four of the most problematic of these laws are ripe for repeal. Doing so would constitute vital steps toward reining in Big Pharma. The two other steps proposed here would require new legislation, but fairly simple legislation at that.
The six simple steps are:
- Repeal the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act
- Repeal the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act
- Repeal the 2004 Project Bioshield Act
- Repeal the 2005 PREP Act
- Outlaw Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising
- Encode Medical Freedom into Federal Law
Repeal the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act
The Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act (Public Law 96-517), better known as the Bayh-Dole Act, was signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1980.
The Bayh-Dole Act made 2 major changes: it allowed private entities (such as universities and small businesses) to routinely keep ownership and patent rights to inventions made during government-funded research. It also allowed Federal agencies to grant exclusive licenses for use of Federally-owned patents and intellectual property.
The Bayh-Dole Act was intended to encourage innovation within government research. As researchers could now profit directly from their work, it was thought they would make better use of taxpayer support. However, as economist Toby Rogers has argued, this ill-conceived law had the opposite effect.
The ability for government contracted workers to patent their discoveries created a disincentive to share them with other researchers, who might beat them to market. Close guarding of intellectual property and lack of open collaboration had a chilling effect on rapid innovation – hardly what taxpayers would have wanted from their investments.
More importantly, endowing Federal agencies such as the NIH with the power to effectively pick “winners and losers” with whom Federal intellectual property would be granted for commercial use, created a tremendous potential for corruption within these agencies.
The Act did contain a provision for “march-in-rights,” whereby the relevant government agency (such as the NIH) could step in and allow other entities use of the intellectual property if the original patent-holder failed to meet specific requirements to make proper use of them for the public good. However, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, in 44 years since the Act was made law, march-in-rights have never been successfully invoked, despite numerous attempts.
The Bayh-Dole Act itself, coupled with the refusal of agencies such as the NIH to ever invoke march-in-rights, has been frequently implicated in the massive price-gouging problems in US pharmaceuticals. In one remarkable exchange in 2016 between Senator Dick Durbin and then NIH Director Francis Collins, Durbin refuted Collins’ prevaricating defense of never invoking march-in-rights, stating:
… if you cannot find one egregious example where you could apply this [march-in-rights], I would be surprised. And applying it even in one, sends at least the message to the pharmaceutical companies, that patients need to have access to drugs that were developed with taxpayer’s expenses and the research that went into it. I think that doing nothing sends the opposite message, that it’s fair game, open season, for whatever price increases they wish.
By allowing the NIH authority to assign publicly funded intellectual property rights and statutory power to protect exclusive use of them, the Bayh-Dole Act opened the door widely for massive corruption between industry and regulators and greatly enabled the extreme degree of agency capture now present at the NIH and other Federal Agencies.
Bayh-Dole has been a failure. It should be repealed and replaced.
Repeal the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act
The toxicity of vaccines was so well-established even decades ago, that a Federal law – the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) was passed to specifically exempt vaccine manufacturers from product liability, based on the legal principle that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” products.
Since Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 NCVIA Act protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines on the market, as well as the number of vaccines added to the CDC vaccine schedules, with the number of vaccines on the CDC Child and Adolescent schedule rising from 7 in 1986 to 21 in 2023.
Furthermore, this special protection afforded to vaccines has prompted Big Pharma to attempt to sneak other types of therapeutics under the “vaccine” designation to provide them with blanket liability they would not otherwise enjoy.
For example, the Pfizer and Moderna Covid mRNA injections, while commonly called vaccines, are not true vaccines, but rather a type of mRNA-based gene therapy. In effect, they are what I refer to as Vaccines-In-Name-Only, or “VINOs.” As pointed out by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and others, the CDC’s definition of “vaccination” was altered during Covid to allow new types of drugs to be labeled as vaccines.
We have now reached the previously unimaginable state where Big Pharma is touting potential “vaccines” for cancer. As the National Cancer Institute admits on its website, these are actually immunotherapies. The purpose of employing this misleading nomenclature is clear: to slide even more therapies under the tort-protected “vaccine” umbrella.
The bloom is off the rose for vaccines. The alarming toxicity of the Covid vaccines caused a worldwide reexamination of this entire class of medicines. Multiple Covid vaccines, including the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca products, once brazenly touted as “safe and effective,” have now been pulled from the market. And the literally millions of VAERS reports implicating the mRNA Covid products have not gone away.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 should be repealed, returning vaccines to the same tort liability status as other drugs.
Repeal the Project Bioshield Act of 2004
The Project Bioshield Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2004, introduced the Emergency Use Authorization avenue for pharmaceutical products to be brought to market. Among other things, this law empowered the FDA to authorize unapproved products for emergency use, in the event of a public health emergency as declared by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
By its very design, this law is ripe for abuse. It places immense power in the hands of the unelected Director of HHS, who can declare an emergency activating the law, and who simultaneously oversees the FDA.
This power was egregiously misused during Covid. Shockingly, the FDA issued nearly 400 EUAs related to Covid for pharmaceutical and medical products, the Covid “vaccines” being only the best known. The FDA even went so far as to grant “umbrella” EUAs for entire categories of Covid products such as test kits, often without reviewing specific products at all. The immense amounts of fraud related to test kits and other Covid-era medical products should come as no surprise.
With regard to Covid-related pharmaceuticals, to this day EUAs continue to be misused to the benefit of Big Pharma and to the detriment of citizens. For example, when the FDA announced the “new” formulations of the Covid boosters for 2024-25, they still released these new products under Emergency Use Authorization. In other words, a full four-and-one-half years after the start of the Covid pandemic, these products are still rushed to market after ludicrously inadequate safety and efficacy trials, based on a purported “emergency” now approaching a half decade in length.
The 2004 Project Bioshield Act should be repealed and the EUA designation it created should be eliminated.
Repeal the PREP Act of 2005
The NCVIA already provided vaccine manufacturers with a blanket tort liability shield beyond the wildest dreams of other industries, but apparently that was not enough. In 2005, at the height of the “War on Terror,” George W. Bush signed the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d), better known as the PREP Act.
The PREP Act, which was heavily lobbied for by vaccine manufacturers, provides an unprecedented level of blanket tort liability to Big Pharma and other medical-related industries in the event of declared bioterrorism events, pandemics, and other emergencies. Again, tremendous power is placed in the hands of the Director of HHS, who has broad discretion to declare such an emergency.
The PREP Act was controversial from the outset – any act that can spark vigorous, simultaneous opposition from both Phyllis Schlafly’s conservative Eagle Forum and Ralph Nader’s left-wing Public Citizen for its unconstitutional nature is surely pushing the envelope.
In effect, the PREP Act has allowed Big Pharma and its captured regulatory friends to completely circumvent routine FDA standards for safety and efficacy under the guise of an emergency, which as noted above, can conveniently last half a decade or more.
Furthermore, in the aftermath of Covid, the PREP Act has been broadly invoked in the legal defense of countless defendants now sued for the excesses, harms, and violations of human rights perpetrated at all levels of government and society. It will take decades in the courts to sort out where the PREP Act’s broad protections begin and end.
This is both absurd and insane. At its inception, the PREP Act was broadly recognized as one of the most overreaching and unconstitutional Federal laws in modern times. The Covid era has tragically revealed the PREP Act to be a murderous failure. The PREP Act must be repealed.
During Covid, government at nearly every level used the specter of a pandemic to blatantly suspend, deny, and even attempt to permanently eliminate numerous fundamental civil rights that are clearly encoded in the Constitution. Furthermore, the well-established and time-honored pillars of Medical Ethics were dismissed wholesale in the name of public safety.
In addition to repealing the deeply flawed laws discussed above, two pieces of straightforward legislation are needed to limit Big Pharma’s undue influence on society.
Outlaw Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising
The United States is one of only 2 countries in the world that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The scale of this advertising is monumental. Total Pharma advertising spending topped $6.58 billion in 2020. The dangers of this are multiple.
First, as we can all see by turning on the television, Big Pharma abuses this privilege by aggressively hawking almost any product it feels it can profit from. The “pill for every ill” mindset shifts into hyperdrive on TV, with an expensive, proprietary, pharmacological cure for everything from your morbid obesity to your “bent carrot.”
Direct-to-consumer television advertisements heavily target the elderly. This is an important component of Big Pharma’s push to promote the Covid and RSV vaccines as routine shots, piggybacking on the wide acceptance of influenza vaccines. Not content to profit off the traditional fall flu vaccine, Big Pharma seeks to create a subscription model for a bevy of seasonal shots against numerous, generally mild, viral respiratory infections.
Even more importantly, direct-to-consumer advertising provides Big Pharma with a legal way to capture media. Pharma was the second-largest television advertising industry in 2021, spending $5.6 billion on TV ads. No legacy media outlet dares to speak out against the interests of entities providing that level of funding. This muzzles dissenting voices and eliminates open discussion about safety issues in mainstream media.
In short, through direct-to-consumer advertising, Big Pharma has bought the media’s silence.
A free society requires freedom of the press and media. The Covid era has demonstrated that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising stifles freedom of the press and media to a dangerous and unacceptable degree.
Somehow, the rest of the world has managed to survive without direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. In fact, many countries do better with respect to health measures than the Pharma-ad-riddled USA. In 2019, just before Covid, the United States ranked only 35th in terms of overall health in the Bloomberg National Health Rankings. Meanwhile, the United States pays more for its middling health rankings than any other nation on Earth.
Encode Medical Freedom into American law
The Founding Fathers would be scandalized to find that the United States needs explicit laws stating that the Bill of Rights is not null and void in the event of a “pandemic,” (or during other emergencies, for that matter), but here we are.
The Founders were well acquainted with episodic infectious disease. In fact, they faced epidemics at a level we cannot imagine. George Washington survived smallpox. Thomas Jefferson lost a child to whooping cough. Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and surgeon general of the Continental Army, promoted inoculation of the troops against smallpox.
Despite those experiences, the Founders inserted no health-emergency-based escape clauses in the Constitution permitting government to deny citizens the inalienable rights protected therein.
As I have written previously, the excesses of the Covid era have sparked a movement toward encoding “medical freedom” into law, to protect our civil rights against medical and public health overreach. (To be fully effective, this may need to be expanded to include any declared emergency – e.g. “climate” emergencies – although that is beyond the scope of this essay.)
Given the excesses of the Covid era, many of which have now been demonstrated to have been pre-planned and deliberate, and given rapid technological advancement of both medicine and surveillance, it is advisable to encode into law assertions regarding medical freedom. While the exact wording may vary, the 2 key points of focus would be explicitly protecting bodily autonomy and limiting the power of public health declarations. Here are two examples:
- Citizens shall not be deprived of any rights protected in the US Constitution, or of their ability to fully participate in society, on the basis of their acceptance or refusal of any medical treatment(s) or procedure(s).
- Citizens shall not be deprived of any rights protected in the US Constitution, or of their ability to fully participate in society, on the basis of a medical or public health emergency.
Encoding such statements into law would accomplish two goals. First, it would substantially rein in the power-seeking element of the public health industry that became such a menace to human freedom during Covid, and which incidentally is tightly entwined with Big Pharma. Second, it would significantly thwart the efforts of Big Pharma to push their wares through a herd-based and mandate-driven approach.
Should someone oppose such explicit statements of our God-given rights, on the basis of “But what if there is another pandemic?”, I would reply as follows: Only once in human history did the world lock itself down due to a disease. It turned out to have been done mostly under false pretenses, and it turned out to be a deadly and disastrous mistake. We are not doing that again.
Conclusion
Big Pharma is a Leviathan, in both the biblical and Hobbesian senses of the word. To truly control it, other measures will surely be necessary. Other needful actions are beyond the scope of this article. Some of these may be very complicated. For example, it is imperative that the gain-of-function bioweapons research be halted. However, this is a worldwide issue, so outlawing it in the US alone will not solve the problem.
However, these six simple steps are an important start. Members of the incoming administration have already spoken about some of them. Success breeds success, and successfully implementing these solutions will help free ourselves from the tentacles of the monstrosity that Big Pharma has become.
Clayton J. Baker, MD is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
Ukrainians have stolen up to half of US aid – ex-Polish deputy minister
RT | November 22, 2024
Ukraine did not receive as much foreign aid as claimed by the administration of US President Joe Biden, and whatever help it did get was largely embezzled, a former Polish deputy minister has claimed. Up to a half of the funds that reached Kiev was stolen by Ukrainian officials, Piotr Kulpa has alleged.
The political commentator previously held several posts in the Polish government, serving as deputy labor minister in the mid-2000s, and is currently a regular contributor on Ukrainian online shows. Kulpa is a vocal supporter of US President-elect Donald Trump, as evidenced by his remarks to Ukrainian journalist Lana Shevchuk on Thursday.
“Everyone understands that war-related corruption is linked not only with Ukraine, but also the supplier nation,” he said. “Who would ever believe that the US burned through $2 trillion in Afghanistan? It’s delusional!”
US aid programs are a mechanism to “write off large sums of money that finance shady systems under the Democratic Party’s control,” he alleged. The incoming Trump administration could review government finances and discover the truth that “Ukraine got very little” compared to the amounts mentioned in public statements, Kulpa claimed.
“But they will also find something else: that a huge portion of the funds was stolen in Ukraine. From 30% to 50%, regardless of the nature of the aid,” he added.
If Kiev were to recover all the embezzled money for the Ukrainian budget, the country would have enough for a year, Kulpa said. He denounced senior Ukrainian officials, whose regular salaries and bonuses he believes are outrageously high.
“It’s a spit in the face of every Ukrainian,” the former minister asserted. “To every European and American taxpayer. This system is criminal from start to finish.”
Trump and his allies have been highly critical of the amount of assistance that the Biden administration has sent to Kiev. The president-elect has argued that EU nations should assume the burden of propping up Ukraine, while the American government should focus on its own priorities.
US concerns about graft in Kiev have been reflected in some government documents, such as a report that Pentagon Inspector General Robert Storch’s office released last week. It said corruption “continues to complicate Ukraine’s efforts to achieve its EU and NATO aspirations.”
From Soros to USAID: How US Organized 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – November 21, 2024
On November 21, Ukraine marks the so-called Dignity and Freedom Day, commemorating the US-backed 2004 Orange Revolution and 2014 Euromaidan, including the US-orchestrated “third round” election that overturned Viktor Yanukovich’s victory to install Viktor Yushchenko.
“The campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing,” The Guardian’s Ian Traynor wrote of the 2004 upheaval in November that year, comparing it to “the US government-funded and organized” Velvet Revolution, Revolution of Roses and an attempted coup in Belarus.
How Much Did the Orange Revolution Cost?
The US and its allies reportedly spent $65–$100 million over two years to support Viktor Yushchenko-led opposition, with much of the funding allegedly covert and funneled through NGOs.
The US State Department:
- in FY2003 and FY2004 officially allocated $188.5 million and $143.47 million, respectively, for “assistance programs” in Ukraine
- $54.7 million (FY2003) and $34.11 million (FY2004) went specifically to “democracy programs” in Ukraine on the eve of the 2004 election
- “Democracy program” funds were used for electoral and government reform, independent media, political development, and training for administrators, lobbyists, and NGOs
- the money was channeled through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Eurasia Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), US Embassy in Kiev, and others.
USAID:
The Strengthening Electoral Administration in Ukraine Project (SEAUP), launched on December 15, 2003, with a $4.4 million budget, partnered with NDI, IRI, Freedom House, InterNews, ABA/CEELI, and the OSCE.
SEAUP‘s activities included:
- training 100,000 polling station commissioners and mid-level election officials in 2004; publishing and distributing 450,000 training materials for 33,000 polling stations in 225 territorial election across Ukraine
- engaging in their work three Justices of the Supreme Court of Ukraine that later blocked and annulled Yanukovich’s victory in the second round
- facilitating the adoption of a “Special Law” in the Verkhovna Rada that framed the December 2004 “re-vote” to bring Yushchenko to power
- facilitating the restructuring of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission prior to December’s “re-vote”
Freedom House, NDI, IRI:
Freedom House, NDI, and IRI funded ENEMO election monitoring, which cast doubt on Yanukovich‘s second-round victory.
George Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation
spent $1.65 million between Autumn 2003 and December 2004, supporting the ‘New Choice 2004’ and ‘Freedom of Choice’ coalitions of NGOs
NED, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Eurasia and George Soros’s Renaissance Foundation
Funded exit polls in all three election rounds, fueling “election fraud” claims and mobilizing opposition protests in Kiev’s Independence Square (the Maidan Nezalezhnosti)
German Marshall Fund of the United States, Freedom House and the Canadian International Development Agency
Provided $130,000 to Ukrainian youth group PORA, which led street protests, and reportedly received $5.3 million from foreign entities, per UCL Professor Andrew Wilson.
The Democratic Party Faces Its Day of Reckoning
By Leonard C. Goodman | Scheer Post | November 19, 2024
Following its crushing defeat in the 2024 election, the Democratic Party might finally face its day of reckoning. The party markets itself as the champion of the working class and a bulwark against the party of the plutocrats. But this has been a lie for at least three decades.
The Democratic Party has partnered with Wall Street donors since at least the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, the party overturned Glass Steagall and other New Deal programs that had effectively restrained Wall Street greed for 60 years. It also sold out American workers with so-called trade deals that freed their bosses to ship American jobs overseas. It ended welfare “as we know it” and passed draconian crime bills that destroyed mostly black and brown communities, sending mothers and fathers to prison for decades in the name of a cruel and senseless war on drugs.
Into the 21st century, the Democrats continued pushing the lie that they were fighting for working people. After September 11, 2001, the party put up a token resistance to the Bush/Cheney regime of illegal regime-change wars, black sites, indefinite detention and torture. All the while, it continued soliciting campaign contributions from the arms dealers profiting from Bush’s wars.
In 2008, the party found a Black face to carry on its Wall Street-friendly agenda. Gullible Americans, myself included, were taken in by Barack Obama’s promises to end “dumb wars” and to institute a single payer healthcare system. We ignored the red flags, like the fact that Obama’s campaign broke records in pocketing Wall Street donations. It was later revealed by Wikileaks that nearly every member of Obama’s cabinet had been selected by the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup.
It didn’t take long for President Obama to crush our hopes that he was a different kind of Democrat. One of his first acts as president was to funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks that, newly freed by Clinton from FDR-era regulations, had embarked on an orgy of unbridled greed, swindling millions of Americans out of their homes and retirement savings with a scheme to sell worthless mortgage-backed securities.
Adding insult to injury, Obama saw to it that the bailed-out bank executives faced no criminal prosecutions and received their year-end bonuses. In their place, the Obama Justice Department brought federal mortgage fraud charges against thousands of poor people — I represented a half dozen of these folks — who had signed their names to the phony mortgage loans that the Wall Street bankers encouraged, packaged and sold to pension funds and other unwitting investors.
The pipe dream that Obama would be an anti-war president was also quickly dispatched. During his two terms, Obama ushered in a new era of continuous war, envisioned by George Orwell and favored by Wall Street. Obama expanded Bush’s bombing campaigns into Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Somalia. Today’s Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Republicans in its ties to war profiteers and trillion-dollar Pentagon budgets.
Obama also effectively ended the Democrats’ promise to fight for a true national health care system in which all Americans would be able to go to the doctor when sick without fear of bankrupting their families. In its place, Obama pushed through a health care plan developed in right-wing think tanks, that guaranteed profits (and taxpayer subsidies) for the private insurance industry and did little to contain costs.
By 2012, Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report was describing the Democratic Party as the “more effective evil” for using its reputation as protector of the working class to neutralize effective opposition and push through right-wing policies that the Republicans could not get passed.
In 2016, the Democrats received a wake-up call when their chosen successor to Obama lost the White House to a crude-talking New York City real estate developer and game show host with no prior political experience. But with the help of its partners in corporate media, the party managed to limp along for another eight years, first by telling the American people that President Trump was an agent of Russia, and then by claiming that Trump was Hitler who was planning concentration camps and firing squads for his political enemies.
Now after the November 2024 elections in which Trump won every swing state and the popular vote, the Democratic party is finally being forced to face some uncomfortable truths. The party’s partners in the corporate media initially tried blaming the election result on the voters for being too misogynist, too racist, or too dumb to vote correctly. But there is little trust that remains in corporate media.
The party’s corporate consultants have put the blame on the party’s excessive focus on identity politics. But the issues for the Democrats run much deeper than bad messaging. The real problem is that the party takes direction from plutocrats whose interests are antagonistic to the needs of the working people it pretends to represent. Both Democrats and Republicans are financed by the same corporate interests. Thus, there is general agreement and support for policies that guarantee high rates of return on investment capital, policies like continuous war, for-profit health care, and outsourcing jobs. This leaves few issues for the parties to fight about other than abortion and identity politics.
Fifty years ago, American capitalists still relied on American workers to build everything from cars and televisions to sneakers and light bulbs. These titans of industry had to care about things such as functioning schools, decent wages, cities and public transportation. But the times have changed. Today’s plutocrats support outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and have little concern for the condition of American workers. And while ordinary Americans want the country’s resources to be spent at home, plutocrats are heavily invested in foreign wars, and they shun diplomacy.
These contradictions could only be covered up for so long. Even with reliable partners in the corporate press, the internet has given Americans alternative sources for their news. During the last few years, in a desperate effort to keep its scheme afloat, the Democrats embraced censorship and a regime of corporate “fact checkers” to police social media and remove or punish unsanctioned speech. In so doing, the party abandoned the last of its core principles: standing up for free speech and the right to dissent.
Many Democrats argue that they had to go after Wall Street money to compete with the Republicans. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained the strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” But for this plan to work, the party still needed an actual message to take to the voters.
Forbes Magazine reports that during the 2024 presidential race, Kamala Harris’s campaign raised a billion dollars while Trump’s campaign raised $388 million. Harris’s substantial edge in fundraising allowed her to flood the airwaves with commercials. But she had nothing of substance to say to voters.
The Atlantic Magazine reports that early in her campaign, Harris gained ground by attacking Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. But then, suddenly, Harris abandoned her attacks on big business at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.
Many Democrats, especially in swing states, opposed the Biden Administration’s unfailing support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all of its 2.3 million residents. Harris could have gained the support of many of these voters by promising to stop arming Israel during the genocide. But her Party’s donors wouldn’t allow her to even hint at such a change in policy. Two days before the election, while campaigning in the swing state of Michigan, Harris stated, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.” But as Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada pointed out on election night, this promise carried no weight because Harris had also promised that she would never do the one thing within her power to stop the slaughter: cut off the flow of bombs to Israel.
After decades of malfeasance and deception, it has become evident that the corporate Democratic Party cannot serve as the lone opposition party to the corporate Republicans. The American people need a viable political party that represents the interests of ordinary working people.
A true workers party will not raise as much money as the corporate Democrats. But it will have an honest message with the potential to appeal to large numbers of Americans. Further, a political party that actually represents workers will press for reforms that begin to even the playing field between the haves and the have nots.
For example, one the most effective ways plutocrats game the political system is by flooding campaign contributions to the lawmakers who sit on the key committees that oversee their businesses. Members of Congress covet these committee chairs because they guarantee high fundraising numbers. Lawmakers who sit on the House Financial Services Committee have jurisdiction over banks and insurance companies and are targeted by those firms with campaign contributions. Lawmakers who sit on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees provide funding for lucrative government contracts and are flooded with war industry cash.
These practices are corrupt and deprive American citizens of their right to be governed by representatives free from conflicts of interest. A judge who has received political contributions from a litigant must be removed from the case. Similarly, the most important functions of government, such as determining tax and how our tax revenue will be spent, should be performed by lawmakers who have not been bribed.
In 2017, the Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned with the Democratic Party, proposed a “Committee Contribution Ban” for Congress. It asserted: “Congress should enact a law to make it unlawful for members of Congress to accept campaign contributions from entities that fall within the jurisdiction of their committees.” Unsurprisingly, this proposal never reached the floor of Congress, that I could find.
Some states have enacted similar conflict of interest rules. And Congress could certainly pass such a law, if it chose. Of course, this will never happen as long as we are ruled by two corporate parties that benefit from the corruption. But if we had a political party that represented ordinary people, countless opportunities for positive change would soon emerge.
Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul University.
US Congressional Leadership Remains United in Devotion to Israel after Selection of New Senate Republican Leader
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | November 18, 2024
Some things changed in politics in Washington, DC when on Wednesday Republican United States senators via a secret ballot vote selected Sen John Thune (R-SD) to become Senate Republican leader, replacing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the position. One of the things that remained the same, though, was that the Senate Republican leader position, along with the other three top leadership positions — Republican and Democrat — in the Senate and House of Representatives, remains held by a politician espousing devotion to the government of Israel and its war effort.
In July of 2022, I wrote about the peculiar situation where these top congressional leaders were then as well lined up in adamant support for the Israel government despite the fact that Americans’ views regarding the Middle East nation were roughly evenly divided between favorable and negative views. Of the people then holding the four top Republican and Democratic leadership positions in Congress, only Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) remains in the group. Nonetheless, the unanimity in over-the-top support for Israel persists, irrespective of how out of step it is with the thinking of the American people, even as over the last year Americans have increasingly opposed the US government’s unwavering supplying of military and intelligence support for Israel waging its expanding war with catastrophic consequences.
In January of 2023, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), a die-hard supporter of the Israel government, became the top Democratic leader in the House. Then, when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was ousted from the House speaker position in the fall of 2023, something astounding happened: All 11 candidates to succeed him as speaker — including ultimate winner Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) — had expressed both their devotion to Israel and their devotion to the US supporting Israel in Israel’s war.
Continuing the trend, all three Senate majority leader candidates — Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — competing last week were express devotees of the US government supporting Israel generally, as well as supporting Israel’s war effort.
Cornyn made his devotion to Israel and its war crystal clear in an October 3 Dallas Morning News editorial titled “America’s Next Commander in Chief Must Unapologetically Support Israel.” In the editorial, he declared:
Support for Israel ought to transcend party lines, religion, race and ethnicity. This is not an issue of opinion; this is a battle of right and wrong, of good and evil. Israel is our most steadfast ally in the Middle East, and it deserves our full support, both in words and action.
I was honored to visit Israel earlier this year, and I was also extremely proud to have voted for widely-supported legislation that sent critical aid and military resources to Israel.
Scott in, of all places, his America First plank of his Rescue America plan put succinctly his dedication to supporting Israel. “We will always defend our allies, starting with Israel,” Scott’s plan declares. Further, Scott made this promise in a September speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Summit: “And, as Senate leader, you can count on support for Israel and protection for our Jewish communities being top priorities.” In the speech, Scott also declared:
We need to show up for our friends and family in Israel right now. We need them to know we are with them, we will show up and we will fight with them.
Thune, the winner of the Senate Republican leader race, is on the same page as his Senate Republican leader race opponents in regard to Israel. Thune wrote an editorial last month titled “America Must Support Israeli Victory.” In the editorial, the senator criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough for Israel. This is the administration that has been pumping out weapons, intelligence, and military support to Israel at an incredible pace to aid Israel’s pursuit of its expanding war. After criticizing what he refers to as the Biden administration’s “tepid support for Israel at a time when it needs a strong ally in the United States,” Thune declared the US “needs to stand strongly with Israel as it faces enemies from every side that threaten its very existence.” And what did Thune do upon winning the leadership race? Thune called the prime minister of Israel, posting at Twitter for all to see a picture of Thune on the phone along with this message: “Spoke with Prime Minister @netanyahu and reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to standing with Israel, our closest friend and ally.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Trump’s foreign policy team signals further drift from ‘America First’ to ‘Israel First’
MEMO | November 12, 2024
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1855593982958379321
RFK Jr. Could Pose Existential Threat to Big Pharma If He Joins Trump’s Cabinet: Here’s Why
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – November 9, 2024
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is primed for a possible senior job in Trump’s White House, promising to “Make America Healthy Again” by reining in big pharma’s enormous influence on US health policy, and by improving food standards. Here’s why the pharmaceutical lobby is going to have a hard time accepting that.
“He’s going to have a big role in health care, a very big role. He knows it better than anybody,” Donald Trump said last week when asked about RFK Jr.’s possible future in his administration. “He’s got some views that I happen to agree with very strongly and I have for a long time.”
Sources told media Saturday that Kennedy has already been asked to make recommendations to the Trump team on appointments to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies have already prepared for the worst, with some execs reportedly hoping Trump and and RFK Jr. have a falling out before Kennedy can do any damage to their respective bottom lines.
“We need to have somebody who is going to be grounded by science and evidence and not somebody who rejects it,” John Maraganore, former CEO of Boston-based biotech firm Alnylam, told FT in a story published Friday, commenting on Kennedy’s prospects.
Kennedy involvement in Trump’s health policy “would be awful on a lot of levels,” a senior unnamed health exec said. “RFK is going to blow up. He’s marching around saying what he wants the administration to do before Trump’s had a chance to take a breath. Eventually Trump will sour on him,” another suggested.
Kennedy’s poor reputation with pharmaceutical companies is understandable, given the attention he’s gotten on the campaign trail during his 2024 presidential run, and before that – for his work as an environmental lawyer, Children’s Health Defense chairman and author of the 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, which spent twenty weeks on NYT’s bestseller list.
Kennedy used the national attention he got over the past three years to promote his favorite causes – vaccine safety and public health. His stinging remarks on these issues, and ability to now have the president-elect’s ear, explain why big pharma finds him so dangerous. Here’s a selection:
Anti-Vaxxer?
Smeared, throttled and censored by legacy media as an “anti-vaxxer” in virtually every article that mentions him, Kennedy has said repeatedly that he’s “never been anti-vaccine.”
“I fought against mercury in fish for 40 years. Nobody called me anti-fish. I like the idea that we have seatbelts in cars. Nobody calls me anti-automobile. I want vaccines that are safe just like every other medication and that are adequately tested. It doesn’t mean I’m anti-vaccine. It just means that I’m sensible and have common sense,” Kennedy said in a tense PBS interview in 2023.
‘Criminal’ Drug Companies
“The pharmaceutical industry is – I don’t want to say because this is going to seem extreme – a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an applicable characterization. For example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer and Glaxo make all of the 72 vaccines that are now effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade,” he told Lex Fridman in 2023.
“And the problem is that they’re serial felons,” Kennedy said, citing the example of Merck’s non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx. “They killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, ‘this is a headache medication and an arthritis painkiller’. But they didn’t tell people that it also gave you heart attacks… We found when we sued them the memos from their bean counters saying ‘we’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money,” Kennedy said.
“The way that the system is set up, the way that it’s sold to doctors, the way that nobody ever goes to jail so there’s really no penalty [and] it all becomes part of the cost of doing business,” Kennedy said.
Big Pharma’s Role in Hooking Americans on Opioids
The opioid epidemic is a perfect example of big pharma’s corrupting influence, Kennedy believes, recalling the latter’s’ lobbying the FDA to tell doctors oxycodone isn’t addictive, and getting “a whole generation addicted to oxycodone. And when they got caught, and we made it harder to get oxycodone, now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying.”
“This year it killed 106,000. That’s twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice as many American kids. They knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money. So I don’t know what you call that other than saying that’s a criminal enterprise,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy vs. Mutilation of Children
RFK Jr. has stepped out against ‘gender-affirming care’ and hormone therapy for children, referring to the former as “surgical mutilation” and the latter as “castration drugs.”
“Minors cannot drive, vote, join the army, get a tattoo, smoke, or drink, because we know that children do not fully understand the consequences of decisions with life-long ramifications… People with gender dysphoria or who want to change their gender deserve compassion and respect, but these terribly consequential procedures should be deferred till adulthood. We must protect our children,” he tweeted in May.
That’s more bad news for the pharmaceutical industry, which has walked lock-step in support of the trans rights movement, and profited immensely from hormone therapy drugs and surgical procedures from the late 2000s onward.
RFK Jr. on Chronic Disease
Kennedy has also vowed to “end the chronic disease epidemic” facing America, another potential blow to big pharma, this one possibly the most serious.
“There is nothing more profitable in our society today than a sick child,” RFK Jr. told Tucker Carlson in August.
“Because all of these entities are making money on him – the insurance companies, the hospitals, the medical cartel, the pharmaceutical companies have lifetime annuities… They want [them] sick for the rest of their lives… When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Today it’s 60%. When my uncle was president, do you know what the annual cost of treating chronic disease was in this country? Zero. There weren’t even any drugs invented for it. Zero. Today it’s about $4.3 trln,” Kennedy said.
RFK Jr.’s Solution? Sweeping Reforms
RFK Jr. has pointed to statistics suggesting that effectively half of the FDA’s budget comes from the pharma companies they’re supposed to be regulating, and said this needs to stop. He’s also said that “entire departments” at the federal agency should be “cleared out,” and that many of the problems caused by big pharma could be “fixed” with effective regulation, tougher penalties for harmful products, taking a page from the regulatory and health care environments of other countries, and a change in the overall culture of the US health care system.
Why Trump’s Triumph Sows Sorrow for Soros
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 09.11.2024
Billionaire hedge fund shark-turned liberal ‘philanthropist’ George Soros’ financial interests and political projects may be in trouble when Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office, with tens of millions in campaign funding, smear jobs and even involvement in the Trump prosecutions failing to stop the former president from making a comeback.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that Soros Fund Management plans to shut down its Hong Kong office as part of a surprise “administrative reorganization” after 14 years of operations.
The move may signal preparations by the Soros family to make major changes in the way their soft power empire operates with Trump back in power.
The campaign by the elder Soros and his son and heir apparent Alex to keep a Democrat in the White House has failed to pay dividends, despite the Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform’s transfer of $60 mln to Future Forward, a pro-Democrat dark money super PAC. That’s on top of a $15 mln donation by an Open Society Foundations subsidiary in 2023.
Along with money, the Soros family invested significant personal capital into the campaign against “MAGA-style Republicans” in 2024. In the spring of 2023, Alex Soros announced a dramatic scaling back of OSF’s operations in Western Europe to focus on Ukraine, Moldova, the Western Balkans, and the United States, with the effort to stop Trump becoming a top priority.
George Soros first sounded the alarm over Trump’s “America First” foreign policy in 2016, when he pumped millions into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign but failed to see his preferred candidate elected. After Trump won, Soros funded an anti-Trump “resistance movement,” manifesting itself in street protests, court challenges to his domestic agenda, secret lobbying of members of his administration, support for lawmakers promoting a neoliberal foreign policy, and even $1 mln in cash spent on the infamous debunked ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ dossier.
During Trump’s first term, Soros lobbied tech giants to regulate social media, funded a campaign to support dozens, if not hundreds, of liberal prosecutors and judges, gubernatorial candidates, congressional hopefuls, and other state and local officials in 2018 and 2020.
Soros and the OSF’s noticeable shift away from meddling abroad to interfering in US domestic politics earned the ire of Trump backers, who sought to declare him a “domestic terrorist,” strip him of his assets, and expel the Hungarian-born billionaire from the country.
When Joe Biden won in 2020, a Soros-linked think tank lobbied his administration to support policies favoring OSF principles in nearly two dozen different policy areas, and laid out $20 mln to create ‘grass roots organizations’ to sell Biden’s $1.2 trln infrastructure bill.
In 2022, Soros channeled $125 mln into a ‘Democracy PAC’ to support anti-MAGA candidates in the midterms.
In 2023, as criminal indictments began to come down on Trump, the former president immediately linked the political “witch hunt” against him to Soros and his “hand-picked and funded” Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, to whose 2021 campaign Soros is known to have donated at least $1 mln.
“I expect that Trump will be found guilty at least in some cases, and will be in jail by election day in November 2024,” Soros said in an August 2023 interview. “If I am right, he is unlikely to win the election. But if I am wrong, the US will face a constitutional crisis that is likely to bring on an economic crisis as well.”
Something seems to have gone terribly wrong in the billionaire’s calculations, with Soros’ ex-money manager, Stan Druckenmiller, warning in mid-October that the markets were “very convinced” that Trump would win.
With the Soros family dealt a major blow in Tuesday’s election and set back to where it started in 2016, only time will tell whether the OSF empire will restart its anti-Trump “resistance” movement, and if the president-elect’s inner circle – steeled by over eight years of efforts to sabotage Trump and undermine his ability to govern – will tolerate Soros-style attacks on the US political system and constitutional order.
DNC still whines about Russia
By Drago Bosnic | November 9, 2024
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This old saying, usually (mis)attributed to Albert Einstein, perfectly encompasses two very prominent mental health conditions of our time – the infamous Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and Russia Derangement Syndrome (RDS). Symptoms of either of these can be disastrous if left unchecked. However, when combined in a single person or an organization, the consequences of TDS and RDS are virtually guaranteed to be catastrophic. The absolute failure of the DNC has left it without both the presidency and US Congress, giving the Republicans an unprecedented political advantage.
Obviously, numerous top-ranking GOP officials are assets of the Deep State, particularly unadulterated warmongers and war criminals such as Lindsey Graham and John Bolton. Their hatred for Russia and particularly President Vladimir Putin is also quite obvious. However, this animosity is strangely “rational”, based on the simple idea that they consider Moscow a threat that keeps US aggression against the world in check, preventing its so-called “full-spectrum dominance”. Thus, surprisingly enough, it cannot be said that every Russophobic Republican suffers from RDS. However, the same cannot be said about the Democrats, who are still obsessed with the “evil hand of Putin and the Kremlin”.
Namely, the DNC simply refuses to take responsibility for its countless shortcomings (there are so many of them that it’s virtually impossible to name a single good thing about the Democratic Party). Cities, counties and states they run are in such a horrible condition that the United States now has millions of “blue-state refugees”, i.e. people who left DNC-run states to escape the absolute chaos resulting from the neoliberal/woke extremist policies and so-called “values” that are absolutely repulsive to any remotely sane and decent person. Thus, the definition of insanity mentioned at the beginning fits perfectly into this, as the Democrats simply keep refusing to change the way they do things.
Worse yet, it seems they’re even more overzealous in defending the policies that have now left them politically impotent. It should be noted that this defense is based not on any sustainable logic or viable reasoning, but on constant whining, screaming and crying. This sort of behavior is more adequate for toddlers and preschool kids, as it’s pretty embarrassing to see grown people throwing hissy fits instead of facing their shortcomings. However, it’s far worse when those same people keep blaming the same phantoms for those flaws. This is where TDS and RDS come in again, as the DNC is still trying to recover from the election loss “shock” (only they didn’t really see it coming).
Thus, they simply won’t stop talking about the “evil hand of the Kremlin” and its alleged “role in electing Trump”. The sheer disparity between their various ludicrous propaganda narratives concerning Russia is truly mind-boggling. Namely, the Democrat-run mainstream propaganda machine has spent the last well over two and a half years trying to convince everyone that Moscow is “losing in Ukraine”, while simultaneously claiming that Russia is “so powerful” it can actually “elect” US presidents (including “through Facebook ads”, of all things). This doesn’t strike the DNC as completely illogical. Quite the contrary, to them, it’s not only “completely sensible”, but the “only explanation” on how they could’ve lost.
CNN, the neoliberal mouthpiece infamous for its pathological hatred for Trump, couldn’t wait a single day after the election and immediately (re)launched the so-called “Russiagate” conspiracy theory. To that end, it invited Bob Woodward, a Deep State-controlled “investigative journalist” who is usually cited as the “man who uncovered the Watergate scandal”. Woodward himself immediately proved that he’s a Deep State asset by claiming that “Putin might be blackmailing Trump”. He failed to explain how exactly the Russian president is doing that, but alas – the narrative simply needs to be kept alive somehow. The DNC has been fighting tooth and nail to push “Russiagate” for nearly a decade at this point.
It seems that this remains its flagship “strategy” in fighting Trump and the Deep State is entirely in line with it. However, the majority of the American people remain unconvinced. In fact, it can even be argued that the narrative has become a meme of sorts, as virtually anything can be “blamed” on those “evil Russians”. The Democrats also seem to think it can be a good way to shift attention away from their numerous corruption and financial scandals, the latest of which involves a $20 million debt they managed to accrue during their failed election campaign. According to multiple sources, the Kamala Harris campaign burned through over a billion dollars, even leaving the aforementioned $20 million in debt.
According to Politico’s Christopher Cadelago, “after raising over $1 billion and left with $118 million in the bank as of October 16, the Harris campaign ended the 2024 election season with at least $20 million in debt”. Cadelago, the California bureau chief for Politico, shared the information on X, citing “two separate sources familiar with the situation”. Breitbart CEO Matt Boyle confirmed this, adding that “a Kamala campaign staffer said there is a massive scandal here worthy of an audit” and that Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, “blew through a billion dollars in a few months”. It seems the largest amount of that money was wasted on celebrity concerts organized precisely by O’Malley Dillon.
According to Zero Hedge, which cites data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Harris campaign received over a billion dollars up until October 16, including when the incumbent Joe Biden was still campaigning for reelection. Over the same period, the Trump campaign got $392 million and spent $345 million, meaning that it managed to save nearly $50 million and also win the election. In addition, the Democrats wasted another $1.1 billion on “aired advertising and associated reservations”, according to AdImpact – a website that monitors the cost and content of ads. The DNC’s financial appetites are very well known, as evidenced by numerous scandals involving the funneling of the so-called “Ukraine aid”.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Hungary’s anti-Orbán opposition party may implode following Trump victory
Remix News | November 7, 2024
While Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Hungarian opposition to Viktor Orbán may seem like two totally unrelated events, they are actually quite intertwined. The Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, is tightly connected to the Biden administration and the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including through financing. With Trump in office, the party’s fortunes may change for the worse.
In fact, the Tisza party is already breaking out into panic following the results of the election, according to Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet.
An online chat group of the Tisza Party refers to the “Western help” that the party receives drying up.
On Wednesday, Magyar congratulated Trump on his victory on his Facebook page, claiming he is ready to work together with Trump and his new administration.
However, in reality, there is no chance of that. Orbán is a well-known loyalist to Trump, and Trump has referenced Orbán throughout his campaign.
Furthermore, Tisza appears to be aware of this fact. Magyar Nemzet reports that in the Discord chats leaked involving party operatives, Márk Porpáczi, a Zala county organizer, said the party’s “biggest trump card is Western aid,” because nobody is interested in party programs but “Facebook is very popular.” He said that the party’s page is being boosted due to “external help.” He also noted it was not just Facebook but also “research, know-how, expertise and other soft power support. Tisza received a lot of help.”
Magyar Nemzet writes that “up until now, it could have been guessed that the Tisza Party received significant contributions from abroad, but no one in the party’s vicinity has talked about it so openly. When Porpáczi talks about ‘sharing research,’ the question can rightly be asked, ‘What exactly can these materials contain, financed by whom, for what purpose and from what source?’”
While Facebook support is one thing, intelligence activities, including clandestine eavesdropping, wiretapping, and theft of chats are also possible.
Regarding Facebook, outside actors may be helping with ad spend, but it also can refer to bot networks run by clandestine groups, including intelligence services like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or third-party groups connected to intelligence, but other factors may be at play. Notably, Magyar’s page receives huge reach on the platform, but like much of social media reach, much is influenced by bot networks and the whims of the people running these social media platforms.
According to Magyar Nemzet, “there is also a direct connection between the Hungarian party and Facebook’s parent company, Meta: Dóra Dávid, Meta’s legal advisor, became Tisza’s EP representative in the summer European Parliament elections.”
The U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, was known for his constant attacks against the Orbán government. He also funneled money to anti-Orbán publications. A new ambassador to Hungary appointed by Trump may entirely reset not only Hungarian relations, but it will likely lead to a complete cut in funding and support to Tisza.
Magyar Nemzet writes “soft power support can be extremely diverse: it can typically mean economic, cultural or even media support from abroad for Péter Magyar. And Donald Trump’s victory could mean that these subsidies will completely or partially disappear.”
In the chat, Tisza members also mocked Trump voters, with Porpáczi writing that “it is meaningless to deny that Trump is campaigning for dumber strata.”
Following Trump’s victory, another wrote about U.S. voters: “What about the people? Are they completely out of their minds?”
While Magyar represents the biggest threat to Orbán in some time, it is still at least two years until elections, and Orbán still remains an incredibly popular politician in his country.
Trump’s victory seals the coffin of “Bush-Clinton era” which lasted three decades
By Uriel Araujo | November 7, 2024
So much is being written now about Donald Trump’s victory in the United States’ presidential election. Few analyses however, if any, are paying attention to a remarkable development, namely the end of the Bush-Clinton era. You might have not paid much attention to it (in all likelihood, you never heard of it), but it started in the 1980’s, and lasted all the way to 2016. Let us go back in time, then.
This is how it worked: starting in 1981, either a Bush or a Clinton was in the White House (as a powerful Vice President or as the President himself) for years onwards. Or, later, in charge of foreign policy. If one recalls, from 1981 to 1898, Republican George H. W. Bush, also known as George Bush Senior, served as Vice President under Ronald Reagan. Being a former Director of the mighty Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is only fair to describe Bush Senior as a powerful Vice President. As the founding father of an era, he deserves a closer look.
Those were the Cold War years, and the CIA was quite a big deal (it still is, of course). The Agency is well known for teaching torture technices to foreign groups, as well as promoting “regime changes” (code for coup d’état) false flag terrorist attacks, assassinations of foreign leaders, and the like. During the Reagan years, keeping up with such a record, Bush admittedly played a role in the so-called Iran–Contra scandal which was about the illegal sale of arms to Iran and then clandestinely using the arms sale to fund the Nicaragua anti-communist rebel group known as the Contras. The Contras were involved in death squads, cocaine dealing, terrorism and torture. To make matters worse, the CIA was accused of getting involved in the Contras narcotraffic operations.
According to diplomat Peter Dale Scott, historian Alfred McCoy, and journalists Gary Webb and Alexander Cockburn, this is in line with a long record of CIA involvement in the dope trade. Back to the Iran-Contra affair: at the time, CIA agent Barry Seal took part in bringing at least three billion dollars worth of cocaine through Mena Airport (Arkansas). This is where Bush and Clinton meet: while Bush was part of the administration running the Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton, who later became President, was the then governor of Arkansas and was accused of being complicit in this operation. That is not the only alleged connection Clinton has to the organized crime world, by the way: his brother Roger Clinton had ties to the Gambino crime family and even served time for cocaine dealing – only to be later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
Back to Bush Senior, he was so powerful a vice that when former American Nazi Party member John Hinckley Jr. shot and injured President Reagan in March 30, 1981, in an attempted murder, rumors and conspiracy theories were spread about Bush being involved in the deed so as to rise to the Presidency. The fact the Hinckley family had connections with the Bush family did not help much in that regard: for one thing, the shooter’s brother (Scott Hinckley, Vice President of the family’s Vanderbilt Energy Corp) was friends with George Bush’s son (Neil Bush). Scott Hinckley was in fact going to attend a dinner party at the Neil Bush home before the incident. It’s a small world.
George Bush Senior did not become President in March 1981, but he did in 1989, thereby succeeding Reagan. One of his greatest legacies, so to speak, is the first Gulf War. As President, he did not make it to reelection and was then succeeded in 1993 by someone very dear to him, someone whom he considered as a son, the aforementioned Democrat Bill Clinton. Again, a small world. Such was the rise of the New Democrats. For Clinton, I highlight two major achievements: pushing NATO expansion and having NATO bomb an European country which then ceased to be (the former state of Yugoslavia). The region is a ticking bomb to this day.
The family connection has remained strong – there are a number of Clinton-Bush initiatives, such as the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. It is no wonder Bushes and Clintons are so close – they took turns running the country for decades. President Clinton, preceded by Bush Senior (whom he called “dad”), was then succeeded, in 2001, by none other than Republican George W. Bush, that is, the son of Bush Senior. George W. Bush would often call Clinton his “brother”. Those were the neocon years. Bush legacies include turning the country into a de facto dictatorship with the Patriot Act, and the two-decades long occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the former being a clear neocolonial enterprise, plus yet more NATO enlargement.
So there you have it with the Bush-Clinton era. That state of affairs lasted at least 28 years, that is, until 2009, when Hillary Clinton (none other than the former President’s wife) could not make it within the Democrat Party and, in a vicious internal struggle, Barack Obama instead was nominated and won in 2009. That’s not the end of the Bush-Clinton era yet. Obama still kept a Clinton (Hillary) in charge of foreign policy, as Secretary of State until 2013. She resigned after some scandals, and was replaced by John Kerry.
Kerry, if one recalls, is George W. Bush’s fellow bonesmen (both are members of the same elite secret society) who was defeated by him in the 2004 election – small world, once again. So much for American “anyone can become President” democracy. Even though Obama was then said to be “the least Atlanticist” President, Obama-Clinton-Kerry legacy includes the empowering of terrorist group ISIS/Daesh, adding fuel to the fire in the Syrian civil war, supporting the Maidan in Ukraine, the destruction of Libya by NATO bombing – and, again, further NATO expansion.
Then Clinton lost the presidential race to Republican Donald Trump in 2016. This ends the Bush-Clinton era. Trump was then defeated by Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and was thought to be done with. Instead, he took control of the Republican Party, sidelining the Bushes and neocons. The Clintons did not make a comeback under Biden for a number of reasons. Biden-Harris’ administration legacy in any case includes being complicit with Israeli genocide in Palestine and playing with world war by increasing tensions with both Russia and China (over Taiwan). So much for Biden’s “America is back” motto.
Now Trump is back, which seals the coffin of the Bush-Clinton era – and this time with full control of the Republican party, with a Senate majority and much more. Trump, as I wrote, is by no means a “peacemaker” and it is not quite true that his 2016-2020 presidency was marked by “no wars”. He assassinated Iranian General Soleimani for one thing and did facilitate the Abraham Accords, which lie at the root of today’s crisis in the Middle East in a lot of ways.
In any case, Trump’s previous administration certainly was no match for his Bush-Clinton predecessors in terms of war-mongering, genocide and nation-destruction – and no match for Biden, for that matter. In all likelihood this time too he will not exceed the aforementioned legacy of his precursors. If such turns out to be the case, and if the slightest restraint is exercised, this in itself should already be good news for the world. The Bush-Clinton era is over, amen to that.
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From the Archives
Stealth Bombers and Bunker Busters
Analysis of the so-called 12-Day War, and the triumphantly celebrated Operation Midnight Thunder
By William Schryver | imetatronink | November 28, 2025
The GBU-57 is a big fat gravity bomb with fins. To achieve effective precision, a B-2 bomber must drop it on its intended target from no further than about five nautical miles — essentially right on top of the target.
Its penetration depth is claimed to be 200 feet. But that capability has NEVER been tested against a seriously hardened deep-underground target encased in layers of high-performance concrete, and topped with a few dozen meters of solid rock. In that sort of real-world scenario, the GBU-57 would be lucky to drill down 50 feet, if that.
It was always ridiculous silly talk to suggest the GBU-57 was the wonder weapon it was made out to be. There is a good reason the US only produced a couple dozen of them and then stopped: they understood its acute limitations in a non-permissive combat environment.
And, notwithstanding the hyperbolic Israeli propaganda, there was never any credible evidence that Iranian medium- and long-range air defenses against fixed-wing aircraft were attrited to any significant degree. And Iranian short-range air defenses were increasingly effective against long-range Israeli drones with each passing day.
As for the B-2: it is a big fat subsonic aircraft. It flies at airliner speeds. A strike on Fordow would entail flying at least 500 miles in and out of Iran. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Zelensky Refused to Discuss Druzhba Pipeline Issue – Fico
- U.S. General Caine Warns: STRIKING IRAN is a HUGE RISK /Glenn Diesen & Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Israel designates five Palestinian media outlets as ‘terrorist organizations’
- Israel, not America, first: Carlson’s Huckabee interview lays bare US foreign policy priorities
- Israeli troops executed Palestinian aid workers at ‘point blank range’: Report
- Iran war What if today’s Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?
- Why Israel Is Escalating Its War Crimes Against Lebanon
- Iran in the face of the armed diplomacy of imperialism
- The US build-up around Iran constitutes strategic war option, not ‘deterrence’
- Iran to US: Sanctions and war failed; try diplomacy and respect
- If Americans Knew
- Footage Shows Israeli Troops Waiting in Ambush, Then Opening Fire on a Palestinian Teen
- The US is on the brink of a major new war that Trump has not even bothered explaining
- Latest Epstein document dump is one more cover-up
- No Protection, No Justice: US Citizens Killed with Impunity by Israel
- Maria Farmer: Epstein Victim Reveals Explosive Information Covered Up by Media
- Average of five Palestinians killed by Israel every day in Gaza since ceasefire – Not a ceasefire Day 136
- Palestinian church leaders admonish Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee – Not a ceasefire Day 135
- Ominous messaging from Trump’s “Board of Peace” – Not a ceasefire Day 134
- ‘Christians Out’: Jerusalem Church Tagged With Hate Graffiti, Police Investigating
- Israeli Settlers Kill American Teen
- No Tricks Zone
- New Research Reaffirms Clouds, Aerosols, And Surface Solar Radiation Are ‘Driving The Climate System’
- Germany: Electric Car Catches Fire At Charging Station, Sets Off Local “Inferno”, Widespread Damage
- New Study: Canada’s New Brunswick Was 1°C Warmer Than Today During The Medieval Warm Period
- Coal Power Back In Trend As Globe Tries To Keep Pace With Growing Demand For Power
- New Study: A 4°C Warmer Beaufort Sea Had ‘No Sea Ice’ 11,700 – 8200 Years Ago
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
- Germany’s Natural Gas Storage Level Dwindles To Just 28%… Increasingly Critical
- New Study Rebuts The Assumption That Anthropogenic CO2 Molecules Have ‘Special’ Properties
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