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BMJ Opinion from former Editor – Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | August 10, 2022

Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) until 2004 posted an interesting opinion piece in the BMJ last year.

I have posted it below for you to read.

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.

As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.

Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.

Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone.

Others have found similar results, and Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.

We have long known that peer review is ineffective at detecting fraud, especially if the reviewers start, as most have until now, by assuming that the research is honestly reported. I remember being part of a panel in the 1990s investigating one of Britain’s most outrageous cases of fraud, when the statistical reviewer of the study told us that he had found multiple problems with the study and only hoped that it was better done than it was reported. We asked if he had ever considered that the study might be fraudulent, and he told us that he hadn’t.

We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary. Some supporting evidence comes from the trial having been registered and having ethics committee approval. Andrew Grey, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland, and others have developed a checklist with around 40 items that can be used as a screening tool for fraud (you can view the checklist here). The REAPPRAISED checklist (Research governance, Ethics, Authorship, Plagiarism, Research conduct, Analyses and methods, Image manipulation, Statistics, Errors, Data manipulation and reporting) covers issues like “ethical oversight and funding, research productivity and investigator workload, validity of randomisation, plausibility of results and duplicate data reporting.” The checklist has been used to detect studies that have subsequently been retracted but hasn’t been through the full evaluation that you would expect for a clinical screening tool. (But I must congratulate the authors on a clever acronym: some say that dreaming up the acronym for a study is the most difficult part of the whole process.)

Roberts and others wrote about the problem of the many untrustworthy and zombie trials in The BMJ six years ago with the provocative title: “The knowledge system underpinning healthcare is not fit for purpose and must change.” They wanted the Cochrane Collaboration and anybody conducting systematic reviews to take very seriously the problem of fraud. It was perhaps coincidence, but a few weeks before the webinar the Cochrane Collaboration produced guidelines on reviewing studies where there has been a retraction, an expression of concern, or the reviewers are worried about the trustworthiness of the data.

Retractions are the easiest to deal with, but they are, as Mol said, only a tiny fraction of untrustworthy or zombie studies. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.” The Collaboration is being cautious but does stand to lose credibility—and income—if the world ceases to trust Cochrane Reviews because they are thought to be based on untrustworthy trials.

Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards. In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research. The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies. Funders, universities, and other research institutions similarly have incentives to fund and publish studies and disincentives to make a fuss about fraudulent research they may have funded or had undertaken in their institution—perhaps by one of their star researchers. Regulators often lack the legal standing and the resources to respond to what is clearly extensive fraud, recognising that proving a study to be fraudulent (as opposed to suspecting it of being fraudulent) is a skilled, complex, and time consuming process. Another problem is that research is increasingly international with participants from many institutions in many countries: who then takes on the unenviable task of investigating fraud? Science really needs global governance.

Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.

Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.

August 11, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Leslie Wexner’s Young Global Leaders

By Whitney Webb | UNLIMITED HANGOUT | August 8, 2022

The following is an adapted excerpt from Whitney Webb’s upcoming book, One Nation Under Blackmail, which examines the network behind Jeffrey Epstein and traces it back to the merging of American organized crime and intelligence beginning in the early 1940s. In this excerpt, Whitney examines the Wexner Foundation’s origins and the ties of Leslie Wexner’s philanthropy and Jeffrey Epstein to Harvard as well as the now infamous Young Global Leaders program of the World Economic Forum. Whitney’s book can be pre-ordered herehere or here

The Origins of the Wexner Foundation

It is hard to know exactly when the Wexner Foundation was originally created. The official website for the foundation states clearly in one section that the Wexner Foundation was first set up in 1983 alongside the Wexner Heritage Foundation. However, the 2001 obituary of Wexner’s mother, Bella, states that she and her son created the foundation together in 1973. Regardless of the exact year, Wexner’s mother, Bella, became the secretary of the foundation (just as she had with his company The Limited), which Wexner wanted people to refer to as a “joint philanthropy.”

The foundation’s website states that the original purpose of the Wexner Foundation was to assist “emerging professional Jewish leaders in North America and mid-career public officials in Israel.” Per the website, Wexner’s main philanthropic endeavors were created after Wexner “reached the conclusion that what the Jewish people needed most at that moment was stronger leadership.” As a result, Wexner sought to focus his foundation’s attention chiefly on the “development of leaders.” As a consequence of this, Wexner’s programs have molded the minds and opinions of prominent North American, as well as Israeli, Jewish leaders who went on to work at the top levels of finance, government and, even, intelligence.

One of the Wexner Foundation’s original advisors, and perhaps one of the most important, was Robert Hiller, who had previously been executive vice president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Robert I. Hiller was described in an article in The Baltimore Sun as a “nonprofit leader who helped develop community fundraising strategies and was active in the Soviet Jewry movement.”

As well as being known as a community development leader, Hiller was also an executive with Community Chest of Metropolitan Detroit in 1948. In that position, Hiller helped bring together corporations such as General Motors to create “social service groups under an umbrella organization, a precursor to collective fundraising efforts today.” In 1950, Hiller became the associate director of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland and six years later he also joined the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. He would spend another nine years in that position before his move to Baltimore.

In his autobiography, Hiller wrote about his extensive dealings with various Israeli heads-of-state, saying: “I had pictures of every Israeli Prime Minister from David Ben Gurion to Menachem Begin. I would have many more with Begin because he was the current Prime Minister. My favorite picture, however, (it was to be hung) was taken in Washington, D.C. at a gala party where Marianne and I were with the then Ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, and his wife, Leah.”

Hiller was extremely proactive when it came to seeding suitable, high ranking candidates for appropriate positions in Jewish community organizations, a task that the Wexner Foundation would later reproduce on a grand scale via its various Fellowship programs and subsequently apply to the worlds of business and government. One example of this matchmaking was the appointment of Larry Moses as assistant to Rabbi Maurice Corson. Corson is credited as having co-founded the Wexner Foundation with Leslie Wexner in 1983, per the foundation’s website, and he served as its first president. After Corson left that post, Moses stepped in to serve as the foundation’s president.

Maurice Corson and Leslie Wexner in an undated photo, Source: The Wexner Foundation

Hiller wrote in his autobiography that he had “personally enticed” Moses to become Rabbi Corson’s assistant and this later resulted in Larry Moses becoming the executive vice president of the Wexner Foundation. When Hiller was 33 years-old, he was presented with an opportunity to become a member of the Big 16, which was classed as an informal grouping of the 16 largest communities in North America headed by prominent Jewish executive members. One of the people who Hiller connected with the Wexner Foundation was originally meant to lead the Big 16 Federation, Fern Katelman. Katelman declined this prestigious leadership role in order to join Larry Moses, where he became his assistant at the Wexner Foundation.

Hiller, when revisiting his life, would state: “One of the most stimulating relationships I had was with the Wexner (Leslie) Foundation of Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Rabbi Maurice Corson was the foundation president. My relationship with him started in Baltimore where he had been a new rabbi for one of the city’s largest Conservative synagogues. He came from Philadelphia with an interesting background and credentials.”

Hiller goes on to write: “He [Corson], however, seemed bored and uneasy with the routine of being a synagogue rabbi. When he and the congregation decided to part company, I assisted in getting him an executive position with the United Israel Appeal of Canada. He did so well that he was recruited to return to the U.S.A. in an executive position with International B’nai B’rith. Leslie Wexner met him through his work with B’nai B’rith, and when Les began to put together a formal foundation, he engaged Rabbi Corson as the chief executive.” B’nai B’rith is a “Jewish fraternal organization” that was founded in the 19th century and is modeled as a secret society, leading some to compare the group to the freemasons.

Hiller went on to assist Corson in the initial stages of setting up the Wexner Foundation while they put together “a distinguished advisory group” with the group meeting in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Hiller describes assisting Corson in creating the foundation, which Hiller called: “an unusual foundation with its own agenda and programming.” After several years of service to the Wexner Foundation, Hiller retired from his consultancy role and was replaced by Philip Bernstein, the former executive of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (CJF).

Now, it makes sense to examine Rabbi Maurice S. Corson himself. Corson was a prominent Jewish educator who, as previously mentioned, already had associations with various Jewish welfare organizations prior to serving as co-founder and then president of the Wexner Foundation. Corson had been ordained as a rabbi in 1960 through the Jewish Theological Seminary, after previously studying at the University of Cincinnati where he graduated in 1955. By 1964, Corson had become the president of the Religious Education Society in Seattle, and he remained in that position until 1966.

Over the following decade, he began working for the Zionist Organization America in Atlantic City and, shortly thereafter, became the Senior Rabbi at the Chizuk Amuna Congregation, a position he held from 1976 until 1979. Around this time, Hiller helped Corson get an executive position with the United Israel Appeal of Canada, where he went on to work for only a year before joining B’nai B’rith.

Once recruited into serving a leadership role within the influential “secret society,” Corson worked as director of development for B’nai B’rith International, based in New York City, between 1980 until 1985. During this very period, the board of overseers of B’nai B’rith included Edmond Safra, a notorious banker with close ties to Robert Maxwell and later Jeffrey Epstein; Edgar Bronfman, scion of the family behind Seagrams whose fortunes have long been tied to organized crime and Max Fisher, a Detroit businessman who re-launched the Jewish Agency, worked as a “private” diplomat on Israel matters and later served as a mentor to Leslie Wexner.

As noted previously, while Corson was at B’nai B’rith, he first met Leslie Wexner, who persuaded him to co-found the Wexner Foundation (per the version of events on the foundation’s website). Although he had been recruited by Wexner and subsequently left the B’nai B’rith organization, Corson became a member of the executive committee of B’nai B’rith Hillel Commission in Washington in 1987.

Another key figure who is important to mention is the co-founder of the Wexner Heritage Foundation, Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman. Depending on which part of the Wexner Foundation site you visit, that Foundation is listed as having been founded in either 1983 or 1985. However, Friedman is clearly listed as the co-founder of the foundation and as having served as its president for a decade.

The Wexner Heritage Foundation, per its website, was created “to strengthen volunteer leaders in the North American Jewish Community.” It spawned the Wexner Heritage program, which “provides young North American Jewish volunteer leaders with a two-year intensive Jewish learning program, deepening their understanding of Jewish history, values, and texts and enriching their leadership skills.”

Friedman was a US Army chaplain during World War II and also served as an “adviser on Jewish affairs to General Lucius D. Clay, the commander of American occupation forces in Germany.” He was later personally recruited by David Ben-Gurion, who went on to serve as Israel’s first Prime Minister, to join the paramilitary group, the Haganah. The Haganah was the pre-cursor to the Israeli military and was armed in large part by organized crime-linked networks. Per the New York Times, “as a member of the Haganah, Rabbi Friedman participated in the Aliyah Bet, the illegal transport of European Jews to Palestine.”

From 1954 to 1971, Friedman was the chief executive of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and, in that role “raised more than $3 billion to support the fledgling state of Israel.” During this period, UJA was intimately involved in the relaunching of the Jewish Agency by Wexner’s mentor Max Fisher in 1970. Fisher was also intimately involved with the related United Israel Appeal. Throughout the 1980s, Wexner was “one of the largest individual contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America” and, after creating the Wexner Heritage Foundation with Friedman, Wexner became UJA’s vice chairman.

While Wexner was serving in these capacities, he was also engaged in closed door meetings with the highest levels of Israeli leadership, not just about “philanthropy,” but also about his business interests. One specific meeting saw him meet with top Israeli government officials about “Chinese and Israeli interests” working with his company, The Limited, to establish factories in the occupied Golan Heights.

Notably, the Wexner Foundation has direct and controversial ties to at least one former Israeli head of state, Ehud Barak, who was intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein and an alleged participant in his sex trafficking operation. As reported by Israel Today in 2019:

“[Barak’s ties to the Wexner Foundation] became an issue only after right-wing journalist Erel Segal called last October to investigate the $2.3 million ‘research’ grant Barak received from the Wexner Foundation, which has in turn for years been the beneficiary of Epstein’s financial contributions. According to Segal, the grant under question was given to Barak in 2004-2006, when he held no public position. Barak insists he has no authority to disclose details about this grant. Only the Wexner Foundation can, if they so choose (they choose silence).”

Developing Leaders

Set up simultaneously alongside the Wexner Foundation, Wexner’s Heritage Program (WHP) planned to connect American Jews with the ever expanding nation-state of Israel. The program was created so as to “expand the vision of Jewish volunteer leaders, deepen their Jewish knowledge and confidence and inspire them to exercise transformative leadership in the Jewish community.” The foundation defines the program as: “essentially a Jewish learning and leadership development program for volunteer leaders in North America.”

There have been, to date, around 2000 “leaders” who have taken part in the program. The WHP is a vehicle for standardizing a certain perspective on the history of Israel, as well as Judaic texts. The two year program is made up of 36 evening seminars, which occur bi-monthly for four-hour periods, as well as three short-term and out-of-town summer institutes hosted in either the US or Israel. Each of these summer institutes are between 5 and 7 days long and take place throughout the program.

As with other well-founded leadership programs, such as the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader program, the Wexner Heritage Program targets a very specific age group, aiming at professionals who are generally between the ages of 30 and 45 years-old. Some of the most important criteria required of program participants include showing a demonstrated commitment to Judaism, the Jewish community and/or Israel and a track record of leadership in Jewish communal life.

The Wexner Foundation website claims that:

“The 2,300 Alumni of the Wexner Heritage Program are top lay leaders at the local, national and international level. In the 35 cities where we have convened WHP cohorts, virtually every Jewish communal organization continues to be supported by our alumni. They become presidents or chairs of synagogues, Federations, JCC’s, Hillels, day schools, camps and more; they often are founders or chairs of allocations or annual campaigns. They serve on the boards of JFNA, 70 Faces Media, the Foundation for Jewish Camp, International Hillel, AIPAC and J Street; The Shalom Hartman Institute, Pardes, Hadar and every US rabbinical seminary; the Jewish Education Project, Prisma, the JDC and so many more.”

It is worth noting that, of those aforementioned groups, the Wexner Foundation (and especially the Wexner Heritage program) enjoys particularly close ties to AIPAC. For instance, Elliot Brandt, AIPAC’s national managing director, is an alumnus of the Wexner Heritage Program and, in a 2018 speech at that year’s AIPAC policy conference, Brandt noted that “most of the [AIPAC] National Board consists of Wexner Heritage Alumni, not to mention its regional chairs and some of its most committed donors as well.”

Elliot Brandt and Alan Dershowitz at the 2017 AIPAC policy conference, Source: Screenshot

Wexner’s close ties to AIPAC take on a different tone when one considers, not only his close association with the Israeli intelligence-connected Jeffrey Epstein, but also the fact that AIPAC itself has long-standing and controversial ties to Israeli intelligence. For instance, AIPAC was at the center of an Israeli espionage scandal in the US in the mid-1980s as well as again in 2004, when a high-ranking Pentagon analyst was caught passing highly classified information over to Israel’s government via top officials at AIPAC.

Despite extensive evidence, particularly in the latter case, AIPAC itself avoided charges. As journalist Grant Smith noted at the time, “the Department of Justice’s chief prosecutor on the [AIPAC] espionage case, Paul McNulty, was suddenly and inexplicably promoted within the DOJ after he backed off on criminally indicting AIPAC as a corporation.” The charges against the specific AIPAC officials involved were also dropped.

In the years after the Wexner Heritage Program was launched, other similar efforts followed. In 1987, the Wexner Foundation announced it would begin channeling “$3-$4 million in grants to the first year of a program dedicated to the enhancement and improvement of professional leadership in the North American Jewish community.”

Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Wexner said an Advisory Group drawn from among leading Jewish academicians and communal professionals recommended that attention be focused on three critical groups: rabbis, communal professionals and educators.” These efforts would result in the formal creation of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship in 1988. Chairmanship of the Wexner Fellowship Committee was given to Professor Henry Rosovsky.

Henry and Harvard

Henry Rosovsky was an economist at Harvard University. Like Wexner, and like many other of the Wexner Foundation’s associates, Rosovsky was born to Russian Jewish parents. He grew up speaking Russian, German, and French and, in 1940, Rosovsky emigrated to the United States of America with his parents.

During World War II, he served in Counterintelligence Corps of the US Army. He became a naturalized US citizen 9 years later. That same year, he received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia, followed by his PhD from Harvard in 1959.

Rosovsky taught overseas as a visiting professor in Japan at Hito Subashi and Tokyo Universities, and subsequently taught Japanese studies, economics and history at the University of California at Berkeley until 1965. He also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, again as a visiting professor, as well as working as a consultant with the United States government, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and UNESCO.

Rosovsky settled down into his eventual career at Harvard in 1965 and brought with him the intention of making Jewish life at Harvard flourish. By 1978, Rosovsky had helped to establish the Center for Jewish Studies, which was led by Harry Wolfson, the first chairman of a Judaic studies center at any American college. Rosovsky was the first Jew to serve on the board of the Harvard Corporation. Rosovsky’s wife, Nitza Rosovsky, also had a presence at Harvard, and in 1986, during Harvard’s 350th anniversary celebrations, she wrote a piece entitled “The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe,” which traces the Jewish history at the university dating back to the 1720s.

Henry Rosovsky posing with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Source: Harvard Hillel

Rosovsky developed a close relationship with some key faculty members at Harvard, including future US Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. In 2017, Summers stated in a video tribute to Rosovsky the following: “Thirty-five years ago, I sat in your office as a young recruit to the Harvard faculty, and I was trembling with the majesty of it all,” he said. “Over time I became less intimidated and came to value your wisdom and your experience.”

Rosovsky became involved with the Wexner Foundation i1987, when the Wexner Foundation announced the aforementioned initiative to recruit, support, and retain “the highest quality professional leadership” in the American Jewish community through grant-making to individuals and institutions. Those individual grants were awarded as Wexner Foundation fellowships and the Foundation appointed Rosovsky to serve as the chairman of the Wexner Fellowship Committee.

Rosovsky was prominent and well-connected by the time Wexner approached him, with his connections including Israeli politicians and heads of state like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. By this point, Rosovsky was also being publicly honored for his many achievements. In 1987, after Wexner had launched several of his philanthropic endeavors, the American Academy of Achievement – a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in the country – had awarded Rosovsky its “Golden Plate Award.”

One of Rosovsky’s most important links that were likely of interest to Wexner was his strong connection with Harvard Hillel. What is today referred to as the “Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel,” the Harvard Hillel is commonly described as a service organization that provides Jewish educational, cultural, religious, and social opportunities for students and faculty. Rosovsky had been a key player in paving the way for Hillel’s relocation from a simple home at the outskirts of campus to a location at the heart of Harvard life. Wexner’s subsequent involvement with Harvard Hillel would also mark Epstein’s own entry into what would become his controversial, and intimate, relationship with the prestigious university.

According to a 2003 article in the Harvard Crimson on Epstein’s donations to the University, Rosovsky was not only one of Epstein’s closest associates at Harvard, but was also Epstein’s “oldest friend of the bunch,” having been introduced to Rosovsky by Wexner around 1991. That is notably the same year that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell began their sexual blackmail/sex trafficking operation.

1991 was also the year that the New York Times reported that four donors, among them Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, had pledged to raise $2 million for the construction of the new student center of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel. In that article, the Times lists Epstein as the “president of Wexner Investment Company.” The building was completed in 1994 and named Rosovsky Hall in Henry Rosovsky’s honor. Rosovsky Hall is a 19,500-square-foot building, which cost $3 million to complete and includes a garden courtyard, a student lounge, a dining hall, a library, offices, and multi-purpose rooms for worship and meetings.

After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Hillel executive director Rabbi Jonah Steinberg claimed that Epstein had merely “facilitated” a gift that was actually donated by the Wexners and did not involve Epstein’s personal money. However, a now-absent plaque on the building, cited by the Harvard Crimson in 2003, named both Epstein and Wexner as donors responsible for funding the center’s construction.

Steinberg did note that Epstein did donate $50,000 to Hillel in 1991, the same year that the gift for the construction of Rosovsky Hall was also made. The following year, records from Harvard’s Office of Alumni Affairs and Development reveal that Epstein was courted as a potential donor by the University, with Harvard’s “most senior leaders” first officially meeting with Epstein to “seek his support.” It is unclear exactly what resulted from this meeting, as Epstein’s first official donation to Harvard was recorded in 1998, raising the possibility that support could have been given in other ways that did not necessarily involve direct donations to the University.

Indeed, when Harvard moved to reject donations from Epstein following his 2008 conviction, Epstein continued to donate indirectly to the University by directly sponsoring several professors as well as a student social club at Harvard. Epstein may have contributed in this fashion during this earlier period, especially given that he had already donated to Harvard’s Hillel by the time of the 1992 meeting.

Jeffrey Epstein speaks with Larry Summers at a 2004 dinner he hosted for Harvard’s biggest names. Also pictured is Alan Dershowitz, among others. Source: Sott

It is worth noting that Epstein’s first “official” donation to Harvard in 1998 was the same year he was using his private plane, now best known to the public as the “Lolita Express,” to transport then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence “Larry” Summers. Summer’s then-boss, Treasury Secretary Richard Rubin, had previously facilitated Epstein’s first official visit to the Clinton White House in early 1993. Summers would become president of Harvard University shortly after the conclusion of the Clinton administration, in July 2001. During Summer’s tenure, Epstein’s access to Harvard’s campus and many of its most notable professors increased exponentially. While president of Harvard, Summers continued to fly on Epstein’s plane.

Developing Young Global Leaders

Though Epstein’s ties to Harvard have been scrutinized, Wexner also dramatically expanded his donations to Harvard during much of the same period. However, the role this may have played in facilitating Epstein’s own connections to the university have been largely glossed over by mainstream media reports on the matter.

Even before Wexner and Epstein donated to Harvard’s Hillel in 1991, Wexner’s philanthropic “development of leaders” had become entangled with Harvard University. In 1989, the year after the Wexner Graduate Fellowship was launched, the Wexner Israel Fellowship program was created to specifically “support up to 10 outstanding Israeli public officials earning their Mid-Career Master of Public Administration (MC/MPA) at Harvard Kennedy School.”

Per the Wexner Foundation’s website: “The goal of the Fellowship is to provide Israel’s next generation of public leaders with advanced leadership and public management training. More than 280 Israeli public officials have participated in the Israel Fellowship, including leaders who have gone on to become Directors General of government ministries, Generals and Commanders in the Israeli military, and top advisers to Prime Ministers.” As part of the program, participants “meet with senior U.S. government officials.” Wexner Israel Fellows also “commit to returning to Israel and remaining in the public sector for at least three years after completing the program.”

Similar claims can be found among Israeli media. For example, Israel 21c stated the following about the program in 2002:

“Several Wexner graduates have gone on to become Director-Generals of government ministries. Others have reached the highest echelons of the military, the health service, and the educational establishment. But ultimately, for Israel, the value of the program is not the titles of its participants, but in the quality of leadership exercised by these individuals at every level.”

That same article also notes that Wexner’s interest in having this program be hosted at Harvard’s Kennedy school “is the quality of the international exposure it permits. It attracts the highest caliber of public sector leadership from around the world and Israeli participants find themselves sitting next to ex-presidents and future prime ministers from every continent. It also creates a rare opportunity for high quality public relations, as future world leaders are exposed to some of the finest and most dedicated individuals Israel has to offer.”

Among the 10 alumni of the first class of Wexner Israel Fellows is Shay Avital, a prominent leadership figure in the Israeli military and who had first served under Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan Netanyahu. Other alumni include Avinoam Armoni, former special adviser to Teddy Kollek, as well as Israeli prime ministers; Moshe Lador, former Israeli state prosecutor; Arik Raz, former governor of Israel’s Misgav region; Uzi Vogelman, current justice on Israel’s Supreme Court; Eduardo Titelman Goren, a Chilean economist who has played a major role in managing Chile’s copper mining industry (the world’s largest); and Yossi Tamir, Director General of the JDC-Israel, “the leading global Jewish humanitarian organization.”

Another interesting alumnus from this first class was Amos Slyper, who was Deputy Director-General of the State Comptroller’s Office in Israel, making him responsible for the auditing of Israeli government ministries and offices. During Slyper’s tenure, the legal adviser to that office was Nurit Israeli, an alumnus of the second class of Wexner Israel Fellows.

As can be seen from just the first class of fellows, the Wexner Israel Fellow programs and its active alumni community have given Wexner considerable clout with prominent Israelis in major positions in government and industry. Years after this program was launched, it has since expanded to include the Wexner Senior Leaders program, which “leverages the training and scholarship of the Harvard Kennedy School to strengthen Israel’s public service leadership and spur innovative, collaborative projects across government departments and agencies.” It specifically seeks applicants from “senior level positions within Israel’s public service sector, including the civil service, local government, government agencies, and security forces.”

Thus, even before the 1991 donation by Wexner and Epstein, Wexner was actively bringing prominent Israelis, many with careers in Israel’s national security apparatus or in the public sector, to study at Harvard’s Kennedy school. In the years that followed, Wexner would become one of the guiding forces behind this particular school and would have even greater influence over the “development of leaders” at the institution.

Shortly before Larry Summers became Harvard’s president, Leslie Wexner, via the Wexner Foundation, funded the creation of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL). The CPL is described as “a premier training ground for emerging public leaders in the United States.”

The long-time director of CPL, who was likely chosen with direct input from Wexner, is David Gergen, an adviser to former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. Gergen has also had a parallel career in journalism and, in the late 1980s, “he was chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, working with publisher Mort Zuckerman.” Zuckerman was a close associate of Epstein and bought the New York Daily News after the death of its previous owner, Robert Maxwell. Gergen is also a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, where Epstein also had memberships.

Wexner’s contributions to Harvard’s CPL reached $19.6 million by 2006 and totaled more than $42 million by 2012. Notably, during this period, Jeffrey Epstein – one of Wexner’s closest associates until they parted ways between 2007 and 2008 – was also making major connections and gaining unprecedented access to the school.

In 2006, when the Wexner’s announced an additional donation of $6.8 million to the CPL, Gergen was quoted by the Harvard Crimson as saying:

“It has been a great personal privilege to work with Les and Abigail Wexner over the past half-dozen years, at the University and beyond. They are both leaders in their own right – people of vision, imagination, and keen dedication to advancing the quality of public life. They have been wonderful partners.”

In 2014, Gergen participated in the Wexner Foundation’s 30th anniversary gala, hosting a session where he interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at length.

Before Epstein’s second arrest, the Wexner-dominated CPL saw Epstein associates like Glenn Dubin and Leon Black creep into its top leadership bodies. For example, Dubin had become a member of CPL’s advisory council, which Leslie and Abigail Wexner co-chaired. Both Wexner and Dubin were pressured to remove themselves from that council after Epstein’s second arrest and subsequent death and departed in February 2020. At the time, the Harvard Crimson noted that the chief of staff to then-Harvard president Lawrence Bacow, Patricia Bellinger, had been added to the board of directors of Wexner’s L Brands (the current corporate name of The Limited).

Also at the time, Dubin had been named in court documents as one of the men Virginia Giuffre was forced to have sex with when she was under Epstein’s control, with another being Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. In addition, as noted by the Crimson, a “former manager of the Dubin household Rinaldo Rizzo recount[ed] his encounter with a 15-year-old girl allegedly trafficked by Epstein who was brought to the Dubins’ house in 2005.” In 2010, Dubin had donated $5 million to the CPL to create his own fellowship aimed at “developing leaders,” called the Dubin Graduate Fellowships for Emerging Leaders.

In another example, Leon Black, of Apollo Global Management and whose “philanthropic” family foundation was also managed by Epstein for years, was on the CPL’s leadership council. Black, however, did not resign his post after the Epstein scandal became a national concern. However, after Wexner and Dubin had left their positions on the advisory council, Black’s connection to Epstein resulted in considerable media scrutiny as well as an “internal investigation” by Apollo. As of 2022, Black is no longer listed on the CPL’s website as a member of its leadership council.

In 2006, plans were made for the Wexner-funded CPL to team up with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) program. The World Economic Forum, which describes itself as the pre-eminent facilitator of “public-private partnerships” on a global scale, originally created what would become YGL in 1992 under the name the Global Leaders of Tomorrow. It was rebranded as the YGL program in 2004.

In recent years, the Forum and its YGL program have become infamous in some circles, specifically after a clip of the Forum’s chairman Klaus Schwab went viral. In that clip, Schwab states the following of the YGL program:

“I have to say then I mention names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on they all have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that we penetrate the cabinets… It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now…”

Notably, that clip comes from a 2017 discussion between Klaus Schwab and the CLP’s David Gergen that took place at the Harvard Kennedy school. In the introduction to that discussion, the close ties between the Harvard Kennedy school and the World Economic Forum are highlighted and it is also mentioned that YGL participants are also present and attending the Harvard Kennedy school for an executive session. Gergen, in addition to his many roles and appointments, is also formerly a board member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which Klaus Schwab co-founded with his wife in 1998, and is also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum.

The CPL began hosting an Executive Session for Young Global Leader participants in order to allow “the Young Global Leaders a much greater opportunity to form personal connections and bonds that will encourage opportunities for the leaders to working together, across multiple sectors, to solve international issues and problems in the future.”

These executive sessions were “designed and hosted by the Kennedy School of Government” and a significant amount of the funds raised were connected to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). In 2007, Epstein’s defense lawyers claimed that Epstein had played a major role in developing the CGI, writing to federal prosecutors that “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges’.”

At the time, the executive director of the CPL, working under David Gergen, was Betsy Meyers, a former senior adviser to president Clinton, specifically on women’s issues. Meyers also played a “critical role in Clinton’s re-election effort in 1996.” The corruption surrounding Clinton’s re-election campaign that year and Epstein’s own connections to that corruption are a key focus of my upcoming book.

Klaus Schwab’s now infamous “penetrate the cabinets” quote may offer insight as to Leslie Wexner’s own interest over the decades in “developing leaders” in American Jewish communities, in Israel and beyond. With nearly 40 years focused specifically on training men and women of influence in American Jewish society – as well as in Israel’s government and private sector – ideas and policies that benefit Wexner both personally and professionally have been instilled into generations of leaders and influencers, who then go on to influence many others. In the specific case of the Wexner Israel fellows, Wexner has been able to “penetrate” key posts in Israel’s government, and even its national security/intelligence apparatus, with people he has funded and who have participated in courses that were shaped by, and reflect, Wexner’s views.

Over the past two decades, Wexner’s foray into becoming one of the main donors of the Harvard Kennedy school allows for much the same to occur, but this time for leaders who operate and influence those far outside of the boundaries of the global Jewish community.

Wexner’s exact reasons for establishing and maintaining this legitimate yet massive influence operation, which paralleled Epstein’s own blackmail-based influence operation, have never been made explicit.

Yet, in speculating as to why he would want to mold the powerful and soon-to-be powerful, it is worth considering Wexner’s lesser known connections, including to organized crime and to Jeffrey Epstein.

Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.

August 9, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon doles out another $1 billion in Ukraine aid

Samizdat | August 8, 2022

The US Department of Defense has announced its largest military aid package for Kiev since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began in February, planning an additional $1 billion in weapons shipments to the former Soviet republic.

The latest batch of weaponry was approved under President Joe Biden’s so-called “drawdown authority,” the 18th such package for Ukraine, the Pentagon said on Monday. It will include more ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers that the US previously sent to Ukraine, as well as 1,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles, C-4 explosives, Claymore anti-personnel mines, and tens of thousands of artillery and anti-aircraft rounds.

The Pentagon also plans to provide 50 armored medical treatment vehicles, plus more pallets of medical supplies and equipment. Biden has now approved about $9.8 billion in military aid to Kiev since he took office in January 2021, including $9 billion since Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders. Congress approved $40 billion in overall new aid to Ukraine in May after previously providing $13.6 billion.

“To meet Ukraine’s evolving battlefield requirements, the United States will continue to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with key capabilities calibrated to make a difference,” the Pentagon said. The latest aid package includes the types of weaponry “the Ukrainian people are using so effectively to defend their country.”

Ukrainian officials have touted the effectiveness of the US-made HIMARS system, calling it a “game-changer” on the battlefield. However, the Russian Defense Ministry has claimed to have destroyed six of the 16 HIMARS launchers that the US has sent to Ukraine, as well as ammunition stockpiles.

Only about 30% of the weapons sent to Ukraine by the US and its allies have actually made it to the front lines, according to a CBS News investigative report that was released on Thursday. Getting weapons to the troops involves navigating a complex network of “power lords, oligarchs [and] political players,” the outlet cited Lithuanian aid group founder Jonas Ohman as saying. However, facing pressure from the Ukrainian government and its supporters, CBS censored itself on Sunday, deciding to cancel a documentary that it had planned to broadcast on the issue and revising the text version of its report.

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , | 1 Comment

Here Are The Winners And Losers In The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | August 8, 2022

As Democrats pat themselves on the back after the Senate finally passed their massive tax, climate, and healthcare bill – the “Inflation Reduction Act” which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called “one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in a decade,” Bloomberg has compiled a list of winners and losers.

Not only did none of the billions in tax increases Democrats threatened high-earners with last year make it into the final version of the bill, their plans to ‘tax the 1%’ turned out to be nothing more than a big virtue signal.

Private equity fund managers

As we noted on Friday, the landmark bill only passed after AZ Sen. Kyrsten Sinema insisted on keeping the carried-interest loophole that allows investment managers (like her former bosses) to shield the majority of their income from higher taxes.

The private equity industry was able to gain an additional win shortly before the final passage of the bill when a handful of Democrats broke with their party to vote on a Republican amendment that created a carveout for private equity-owned companies in the corporate minimum tax. -Bloomberg

Manchin and Sinema were big winners – after having held their party hostage for more than a year over this legislation, “The entire contents of the bill were essentially cherry-picked by Manchin and then tweaked to fit Sinema’s preferences,” according to the report.

The two were also able to score direct benefits for their states – with Manchin securing an agreement to permit the completion of the Equitrans Midstream Corp.’s Mountain Valley Pipeline, and Sinema – who was able to secure $4 billion in drought relief for western states.

The IRS And The Green agenda

The bill will give $80 billion to the IRS over the next 10 years to expand its audit capabilities, as well as a bevy of technology upgrades.

Meanwhile, electric carmakers got an extension of a popular $7,500 per vehicle customer tax credit for EVs, but will have to comply with strict battery and critical minerals sourcing requirements demanded by Sinema and Manchin – which could render the credits useless for years.

Solar and hydrogen companies, such as Sunrun and Plug Power, Inc. will also benefit from generous tax credits, while operators of nuclear reactors such as Southern Co., Constellation Energy Corp., Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. and Energy Harbor Corp. could benefit from a $30 billion production tax credit.

Medicare, Obamacare Enrolees

The final version of the bill caps seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses to $2,000 per year, and enables Medicare to negotiate the prices on 10 medications four years from now. Th bill also kicks the can on a massive increase in Obamacare premiums that were set to happen in January for many middle income Americans, which will now happen in three years.

LOSERS:

Republicans who thought Manchin and Sinema wouldn’t cave on their promises to raise taxes during a recession.

The GOP was confident they had beaten back Biden’s tax and climate agenda and were stunned in late July when Schumer and Manchin announced a deal. While still the favorites to gain seats in the midterm elections, passage of the bill is a major setback for the GOP’s policy aims. It does, however, give them a new issue to campaign on in the fall campaigns. -Bloomberg

Other losers include tech companies – that will bear the brunt of two major tax increases in the bill; a 15% minimum tax on financial statement profits, and a new levy on stock buybacks which have allowed companies like Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook to minimize their tax burden over the years.

SALT – the ability to deduct state and local taxes, a $10,000 cap which coastal Democrats were hoping to repeal.

Bernie Sanders – who Bloomberg notes wanted $6 trillion in spending, making the $437 billion in new spending a far cry from success. Excluded from the bill is all proposals for new social programs, including tuition-free-college, child care, housing spending and an expanded-child monthly tax credit.

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Nuclear Power | | Leave a comment

Most Ukraine aid is a ‘scam’ – US lawmaker

Samizdat | August 7, 2022

Republican lawmakers are feeling vindicated for opposing a $40 billion Ukraine aid package after a CBS News report showed that only 30% of the Western weapons flooding into the country are actually making it to the front lines in Kiev’s conflict with Russia.

“This [is] one of the reasons I voted ‘no,’” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said on Twitter in a retweet of the CBS News post. Greene was among 57 House Republicans who voted against the massive aid bill, which passed overwhelmingly in May with the support of all Democrats and most GOP lawmakers. Eleven Republicans opposed the bill in the Senate, where it passed by an 86-11 margin.

The CBS story noted that with nearly $60 billion in US and Western European aid approved for Ukraine since Russia’s military offensive began in February, most of the weaponry has failed to get through to Ukrainian fighters. Getting weapons to the troops involves navigating a complex network of “power lords, oligarchs [and] political players,” the outlet cited Lithuanian aid group founder Jonas Ohman as saying. Amnesty International senior crisis adviser Donatella Rovera told CBS that “there is really no information” on where the weapons are going.

Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said such scrutiny had been dismissed prior to the CBS report. “How many people were called Russian bots for saying this exact same thing since March? Now, when CBS says it, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever the case, glad the facts are out now. The majority of the Ukraine aid is a scam.”

US Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) delayed the Senate’s vote on the Ukraine aid bill by insisting on adding a provision appointing an inspector general to monitor how the money was being spent. His colleagues refused to include the oversight requirement and passed the massive package a few days later. A US intelligence official told CNN in April that arms shipments were dropping “into a big black hole” once they reached Ukraine.

Greene, Boebert and other lawmakers who voted against the aid bill were pilloried by critics for failing to support Ukraine. After Greene argued that the US government was focused on sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine at a time when American mothers couldn’t even buy formula for their babies, Democrats accused her of standing “with President Putin in the face of Russian aggression.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said she was “repeating Putin’s propaganda and disinformation” and “appeasing imperialist assaults on sovereign nations.”

The Georgia lawmaker also tussled with a fellow Republican after Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) defended the Ukraine aid package by saying “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.” Greene replied, “So you think we are funding a proxy war with Russia? You speak as if Ukrainian lives should be thrown away, as if they have no value. Just used and thrown away.”

August 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption | , | 1 Comment

Here’s what government and industry came up with to wiggle out of liability for monkeypox vaccine injuries

By Meryl Nass, MD | August 7, 2022

Although I don’t have the full story yet, I am warning you that the moneypox vaccine Jynneos is a huge scam, in every way, including the supposed shortage. I will disclose more about that soon.

But since it is actually licensed, the moneypox vaccine (like other licensed drugs and vaccines) has liability attached to it. You can currently sue government program planners, the doctor who recommended it, the manufacturer, etc. if anything goes wrong.

To forestall that, some crook came up with the idea of splitting the doses, under the guise of a fake shortage, which provides an excuse to make the lower dose an EUA–in other words, turning it into a product for which you cannot sue anyone if something goes wrong. Pretty clever, eh?

Licensed products are not supposed to receive EUAs unless they are used for something different than what they were licensed for. Splitting the dose does not change the fact it is licensed for monkeypox and being used for moneypox.

Here is another possible but diabolical reason to split (dilute) the dose:  it potentially allows the federal government access to the vials–so the vials won’t go straight from the manufacturer to the wholesaler but instead go somewhere else to be diluted. And what is in the diluent?

From the NY Times :

… Federal officials have ordered nearly seven million doses of Jynneos, but the shots will not arrive for months. So far, the Biden administration has shipped about 600,000 doses to states. It said last week that 800,000 additional doses were being allocated to states, but the distribution could take weeks.

Faced with shortages, some cities, including Washington and New York, are restricting second doses to stretch their supplies. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. have disagreed with that strategy, noting that Jynneos is approved as a vaccine to be given in two doses spaced 28 days apart.

But as federal health officials declared a public health emergency on Thursday, Dr. Robert Califf, the commissioner of the F.D.A., said the agency was now considering authorizing shots that contain just one-fifth of the regular dose, delivered between layers of the skin instead of under it.

The F.D.A. would need to grant Jynneos an emergency use authorization in order for it to be administered this way.

The dose-sparing approach has been used when supplies of other vaccines are scarce. But giving intradermal shots requires more skill than is needed for more traditional immunizations.

One shot is probably enough to forestall severe symptoms in most people, and the dose-sparing strategy may work just as well. But it’s unclear whether a scaled-back regimen is enough to prevent infection, and if so, how long that immunity may last, federal health officials said…

August 7, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The First Cracks in the Biden-Zelensky Relationship Appear. But Why Now?

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 4, 2022

You might have easily missed it. The reference, for the first time by the left-wing press in the US which supports Biden, that corruption exists and is a real problem in the administration of President Zelensky in Ukraine.

The article, penned by the Washington Post’s top foreign affairs correspondent and award-winning journalist Thomas L Friedman, was really about hinting that relations between the Biden camp and Zelensky’s was hardly one on firm ground. Perhaps it never was. But for the moment, this narrative is being fed into the system – via Friedman – is that relations are not quite what they are perceived to be by most western media.

The timing is interesting as I have long argued that the US is looking for a way to distance itself from Zelensky and may well be considering how to remove him (even by assassination which could be blamed on the Russians). Is the Biden camp preparing the ground for such a move with this article?

Friedman described Zelensky’s decision to fire Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova and the head of the State Security Service (SBU), Ivan Bakanov, in mid-July as “funny business going on in Kiev” adding that he hadn’t yet seen any reporting in the US media that “convincingly explains” the reasons behind the largest shakeup in the Kiev government since the beginning of the war. He then hits us with the kill shot.

It is as if we don’t want to look too closely under the hood in Kiev for fear of what corruption or antics we might see, when we have invested so much there,” he wrote.

Is this a hint of some sort? Is Biden warning Zelensky to clean his backyard up and to keep the lid on re-selling of US arms to the black market of weapons, which often means selling to terrorist groups in Syria – or else. 

Or is he saying to the rest of the media, that this is the theme which we would like you to carry on? Certainly, to start with the Washington Post and using someone like Friedman would be a deft media move to create a momentum on the given theme of graft getting out of control. But equally, it would be an erudite move to send a message to Zelensky himself. We will soon know in the coming weeks.

It’s quite possible that Biden’s camp knew about the Ukraine military selling off huge amounts of the military sent to the Ukraine and were quite happy with it, as long as Zelensky played ball on a number of matters which revolved around the same theme: the White House calls the shots on the day-to-day events of the war. This feeds into the thousands of satirical memes on social media which portray Zelensky as some kind of sex slave, complete with PVC underwear.

But here are the five scenarios which explain the corruption and weapons being resold

  1. Money laundering. Biden is sending the hardware and Zelensky is selling half of it to the arms market. The money is being kept by Zelensky on behalf of Biden. Zelensky is simply a bank manager for Biden whose family have many murky business deals in the country anyway.
  2. Biden is aware of the arms being sold on and Zelensky keeping the profits in return for keeping a number of business deals which the Biden family have there.
  3. The Ukrainian military is selling the equipment and keeping the profits themselves and Zelensky is not part of it, although he gives tacit approval to it.
  4. The cash from the arms re-selling and also money from US taxpayers is being held in a ‘dirty bank’ account, controlled by Zelensky which the Biden family are keeping for their own purposes.
  5. The Biden camp are using such profits to arm and fund its own terrorist groups in the Middle East or other hotspots in the world. This dirty money can be useful for Biden in exactly the same way that Reagan used 30 million dollars from the Iranians in the 80s, used in part to fund the ‘Contras’ in Nicaragua.

Has Biden figured that the way to divert opprobrium from the US media is to get out of the war in Ukraine and look at a second phase later on? He could quickly reduce the levels of military packages and cash citing concerns over accountability while directing media to the new ‘threat’ of China, which of course, was completely manufactured by him and Pelosi. Is this the win-win scenario where he can continue to shove scores of billions of US taxpayers’ money to the military industrial complex which some sceptical hacks might assume are giving him and his family huge kickbacks in return – while at the same time try to hoodwink the US public that a military standoff with China is going on and he alone is saving America? That should bring him nicely up to the midterms and perhaps voters will not notice 5 dollar a gallon gas and America in the deepest recession since 1929, right? Watch very closely how US journalists now slowly turn on Zelensky and start looking at his government and actions through clearer, non rose-tinted specs.  ‘Graft’ is about to become the new Ukraine subject for western media. About time.

August 5, 2022 Posted by | Corruption | , | 2 Comments

Ukraine claims it needs $750 billion more to ‘Build Back Better’

Kiev economics school assessment is funded by USAID

By Jordan Schachtel | The Dossier | August 3, 2022

A new US-funded report out of Kiev assesses $108.3 billion in economic damages for Ukraine, but requests a 7x replenishment of $750 billion so that the country can “Build Back Better.”

The Kyiv School of Economics has released a new assessment claiming that Ukraine will need hundreds of billions of dollars to “Build Back Better” from its war against Russia.

As of August 1, 2022, the new update from the Ukrainian institution assesses $108.3 billion in economic damages from the war, roughly the equivalent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2020.

But as you’ll see in a moment, those damages are rookie numbers. In this era of money printing madness, Ukraine has much more ambitious plans than simply replacing damaged infrastructure. These “expert” economists are about to send the tab soaring.

The study says Ukraine will need a bare minimum of $185 billion, almost twice the amount in damages, in order to repair the nation, citing what they refer to as the “Build Back Better principle.” The slogan was popularized by The World Economic Forum, and is used by governments to refer to their plans to impose digital tyranny and accomplish ESG-compliant objectives.

Ukraine is seeking the “modernization of assets that have not suffered damage and destruction,” the report adds That request will mark up the economic aid request to the tune of $750 billion dollars.

Notably, President Volodomyr Zelensky’s office has previously cited the exact $750 billion number, but claimed it was the total cost of losses. “Now we are working on a long-term plan for the recovery of Ukraine. It defines the list of national reconstruction programs. We have incorporated the Build Back Better principle into this plan,” Zelensky’s deputy said last month.

At the end of the report, we find that the robust damages assessment is not an independent effort. In fact, it is funded by the U.S. taxpayer, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The “assessment” is just the latest document that advances the continuing global campaign to solicit funds for the rebuilding, reconstruction, and “modernization” of Ukraine, despite the fact that the war is ongoing. There has been a concerted effort in the D.C. lobbying and military contracting space to score massive funds for the “reconstruction” effort.

Meanwhile in D.C., Congress is beginning to whip the votes for a new funding round for Ukraine, yet very few lawmakers having any idea where the first $40 billion ended up.

The Biden Administration continues to send regular military assistance to Ukraine, depleting U.S. stockpiles in the process, and it hasn’t helped the country turn the tide of the war. On Monday, the White House authorized an additional $550 million in weaponry for Kiev.

August 4, 2022 Posted by | Corruption | , | 2 Comments

Chief Medical Officer of Health was paid record cash bonus during height of lockdowns

By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | August 1, 2022

During the height of lockdowns and mandates, when Albertans were fed daily fear propaganda, Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province of Alberta Deena Hinshaw received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a cash bonus.

Last year, Hinshaw reportedly received $227,911 in “cash benefits,” nearly as much as her base salary of $363,634. This brings Hinshaw’s total annual earnings to over half a million at $591,545.

“The scale of the response to this unprecedented public health emergency required an extraordinary amount of additional work from the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, the Vaccine Task force, the Pandemic Response Team and others, which is reflected in the recent disclosure,” explained Ministry of Health spokesperson Mark Feldbusch in an email.

As previously reported by The Counter Signal, earlier this year, Hinshaw admitted that Alberta Health Services (AHS) reported non-ICU patients as ICU patients throughout the pandemic.

“As we have been doing continual quality assurance work with our data, it was identified over time some units in some hospitals have shifted back and forth between being available for use as an ICU unit or a non-ICU unit,” Hinshaw said.

“In some of our historical data, patients admitted for COVID treatment were categorized as being in ICU when the unit they were on, in fact, had been changed back to a non-ICU unit at that time.”

In other words, the figures were wrong. The entire time that ICU numbers were used as a key point to justify lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports in Alberta, the government intentionally or unintentionally utilized eschewed data, if not outright manipulated data.

Now, it looks like misreporting figures used in a fearmongering campaign apparently made Hinshaw worthy of a taxpayer-funded bonus.

August 1, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 3 Comments

New Evidence: Fauci Imposed a Vaccine Delay that Cost Trump the Election

By Toby Rogers | July 31, 2022

I. Fauci fires Trump

Think back to July 2020. Trump and Fauci were at war with each other. Key leaders within the Trump administration, including Peter Navarro, wanted to fire Fauci. There were riots in the streets as people protested the murder of George Floyd. And new evidence shows that behind the scenes, Fauci was working to torpedo Trump’s chances for re-election.

We already knew that Fauci, the FDA, CDC, and the pharmaceutical industry went to great lengths to block safe and effective treatments including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in order to prolong the pandemic and create the market for Covid-19 vaccines. But a new book reveals that Fauci also forced Moderna to delay their clinical trial by three weeks — which pushed the release of their preliminary results until after the presidential election.

This key piece of information comes from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon. Cultural capture and too many shots apparently prevent one from connecting the dots, so I will do it for him.

Most people already know the broad brush strokes of the Moderna story — they had never successfully brought a product to market before Operation Warp Speed. They were grifters — they took $25 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2013 to develop mRNA products that never worked and another $125 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2015 for a vaccine for Zika that also failed. But Fauci really liked these grifters and so when the pandemic began in 2020, BARDA directed $483 million to Moderna for Covid-19 vaccine development — and Moderna cut NIH in on the patents. That gave NIH and especially Fauci control over what came next.

The key paragraphs from Loftus’ WSJ essay are here:

Dr. Zaks [Chief Medical Officer for Moderna] had wanted to use a private contract research organization to run the whole trial, but NIAID officials wanted their clinical-trial network involved. Eventually, Dr. Zaks backed off, and both entities participated. “I realized we were at an impasse, and I was the embodiment of the impasse,” Dr. Zaks said.

Next, when Moderna’s 30,000-person study began enrolling volunteers in July 2020, the subjects weren’t racially diverse enough. Moncef Slaoui, who led Warp Speed’s vaccine efforts, and Dr. Fauci began holding Saturday Zoom calls with Mr. Bancel and other Moderna leaders to “help coax and advise Moderna how to get the percentage of minorities up to a reasonable level,” Dr. Fauci recalled.

Drs. Fauci and Slaoui wanted Moderna to slow down overall enrollment, to give time to find more people of color. Moderna executives resisted at first. “That was very tense,” Dr. Slaoui said. “Voices went up, and emotions were very high.” Moderna ultimately agreed, and the effort worked, but it cost the trial about an extra three weeks. Later, Mr. Bancel called the decision to slow enrollment “one of the hardest decisions I made this year.”

The claim that Fauci cared about racial diversity in the clinical trial is a lie. How do we know this? Later “clinical trials” for Pfizer and Moderna in kids looked at antibodies in the blood, not actual health outcomes, in only about 300 study participants. The number of people of color enrolled in those undersized trials were in the single digits (literally two or three Black participants total) — so those results were not statistically significant. Yet this did not stop authorization. It appears that Fauci’s delay tactics were designed to accomplish a different goal.

Let’s do the math:

Moderna released their preliminary results — claiming 94.5% effectiveness — on November 16, 2020.

The presidential election was less than two weeks earlier — on November 3, 2020.

Trump lost by less than 1% of the vote in 4 key swing states.

Fauci’s demand to slow down enrollment in July 2020 cost Moderna 3 weeks.

If Moderna had released their results 3 weeks earlier — on October 25, 2020, Trump would have scored a major win in the final week of the campaign and won the election.

It does not matter how one feels about Trump or Biden. A massive political win in the week before the election would have convinced enough voters of Trump’s competence and thus pushed Trump’s vote total over the top.

What about Pfizer? They also could have published their preliminary results prior to the election which would have secured Trump’s re-election. According to Loftus, Pfizer “opted out of Operation Warp Speed for fear it would slow the company down.” Pfizer still took $2 billion off of the Trump administration for advance purchase orders. But Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer clearly preferred Biden and so they held their preliminary results until November 9, 2020 — just 6 days after the election. The Biden administration returned the favor by giving Pfizer a blank check and authorizing shots for additional age groups based on the worst “clinical trial” results anyone has ever seen.

The important thing to understand in all of this is that Fauci, the FDA, NIH, and CDC are political functionaries pretending to be scientists. Pandemics, vaccines, and public health are a way for the Democratic Party machine to direct billions of dollars to their base and reward large donors to the party. These companies and their bureaucratic enablers were happy to take money off of Trump. But they knew that they could get an even better deal from Biden.

As you know, the results of this criminal scheme are gruesome. The Covid-19 shots authorized right after the 2020 election have made no discernible impact on the course of the pandemic. Far more people have died of Covid-19 since the introduction of the shots under Biden than during the Trump administration when no Covid-19 shots existed. The Covid-19 shots have negative efficacy and even quadruple-dosed Biden and quadruple-dosed Fauci have contracted Covid-19, twice. These are the deadliest and most toxic shots in the history of the world.

So what started out as a grift turned into mass murder and a crime against humanity.

And now it’s happening again…


II. Pfizer and Moderna move up the release date for reformulated Covid-19 shots in the effort to help Democrats win the midterm elections

On Thursday of last week, the White House and the FDA told their favorite stenographers at the NY Times that Moderna and Pfizer are going to release their reformulated Covid-19 shots, that will completely skip clinical trials, in mid-September.

As readers of my Substack will recall, back on June 28, Pfizer said that the fastest the reformulated shots could be released was October; Moderna said “late October or November” — provided they could skip clinical trials (which of course the FDA granted because they work for Pharma). Did Pfizer and Moderna not understand their own production capabilities? How did Pfizer and Moderna suddenly speed up their production schedule by 6 weeks?

It appears that once again, the public health gatekeepers are doing politics not science. If shots go into bodies in the last two weeks of September, Democrats will claim progress against Covid during October right before the midterm elections on November 8. It’s basically the political win that these same actors denied to Trump (it’s not a public health win, as I will show below).

What’s likely driving this is that Fauci, Pfizer, Moderna, the FDA, CDC, and NIH all want Democrats to retain the House and Senate in order to prevent hearings into their bungling of the Covid-19 response. Of course they also want to keep the Covid-19 vaccine gravy train going as long as possible.

But, you’re surely saying to yourself, we know that these 5th dose reformulated shots are likely to cause catastrophic harms. We’re already seeing a 5% to 15% increase in all-cause mortality across the most heavily vaccinated countries as a result of non-specific effects from these shots. There are 29,790 VAERS reports of death following these shots and this is likely an underestimate by a factor of 41 (so actual death toll = 1,221,390). These reformulated shots are going to use a form of mRNA never tried before and skip clinical trials altogether, so the harms could be even worse. There also seem to be cumulative harms from these shots — the more doses, the more messed up the immune system, the more vulnerable one is to Covid and all sorts of other diseases including cancer.

So how exactly do they plan to get away with this, especially right before an election?

The same way they always get away with it — they own the media. Pfizer and Moderna will rush out press releases claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The CDC’s in-house newsletter, MMWR, will rush out articles and janky studies claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The mainstream media will dutifully report that these reformulated shots are a miracle. Meanwhile, people you know and love — coworkers, friends, neighbors, and family — will be getting injured and killed by these shots. Yet all of the stories in the news will be hosannas about the genius of Tony Fauci, Peter Marks, and the FDA. Billions of dollars of dark money from Pharma will flow into Democratic Congressional campaign coffers. If Democrats can retain the House and Senate they will reward Pfizer and Moderna by blocking any inquiry into the failed Covid-19 response. Win, win, win for Pharma. Everyone else loses.

Which brings me to my last point….


III. Republicans, you have to step up and fight for us or you will lose

Republicans thought that they could take back the House and Senate simply by not being Democrats. Most Republicans did not really fight for us, they just sat back and let Dems destroy themselves. That plan was working until the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Now the Republican advantage in the generic Congressional ballot (‘which party do you prefer’) has evaporated. Pelosi has passed a range of popular bills. Manchin has fallen in line so Biden will likely get some late legislative wins. Gas prices have declined somewhat. And now it appears that Democrats, who were left for dead just weeks ago, will retain the Senate and may retain the House.

IF REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT ABOUT DEMOCRATS’ FAILED RESPONSE TO COVID!

No more sitting back. No more making warrior mamas do all of the emotional labor for our country. If Republicans want to win they have to make it clear that they will fire, arrest, and prosecute Fauci (and all of his lieutenants) as soon at Republicans take power. Fauci funded the creation of the chimera virus, blocked access to safe and effective treatments, and inflicted deadly toxic vaccines on the entire population. Over 2 million Americans are dead as a direct result of Fauci’s corruption (1 million dead from/with Covid, over 1 million dead from the shots). If Republicans cannot be bothered to sink this two-foot putt then they don’t deserve to win. If Republicans want the votes of the 18 million single-issue medical freedom voters who decide every national election these days — that’s what they have to run on: #ArrestFauci!

August 1, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“I’ve Delivered”: New Disclosures Demolish President Biden’s Denials on Hunter Dealings

By Jonathan Turley | July 28, 2022

New disclosures are demolishing the continued denials of President Biden that he had no knowledge and nothing to do with his son’s business interests. The emails (reviewed by Fox and The Daily Mail ) include exchanges with at least 14 of Hunter Biden’s business associates while Joe Biden was vice president. They cast further doubt on the president’s repeated claims that he had no knowledge of his son’s foreign business dealings.  In one almost plaintive email, Hunter actually complains to an associate that he had delivered on everything that was demanded of him in getting access to his father and the White House.

President Biden and the White House continue to repeat his denial from the campaign trial in 2019: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” These denials have continued even after an audiotape surfaced showing President Biden leaving a message for Hunter specifically discussing coverage of those dealings.

Some of us have written for two years that Biden’s denial of knowledge is patently false. Indeed, it is baffling how Attorney General Garland can ignore the myriad of references to Joe Biden in refusing to appoint a special counsel.

There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.

People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”

Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

The new disclosures only add details to the the extent of his knowledge and involvement. It appears that Biden met with at least 14 of Hunter’s business associates from the U.S., Mexico, Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan over the course of his vice presidency. That includes Hunter’s Mexican business associates, Miguel Aleman Velasco and Miguel Aleman Magnani who visited the West Wing on Feb. 26, 2014, and Joe was later photographed with Hunter giving Velasco and Magnani a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room.

Hunter is clearly eager to get photos as a deliverable for the visits. In one email in April 2014 to David Lienemann, Biden’s official photographer, Hunter asks “Do you have pictures from the lunch I had in dad’s office (I think on 2/26) with Miguel Alleman [sic] Sr. And Jr. And Jeff Cooper? If so let me know and I can send someone to pick them up. Thanks. How was Kiev?”

Other emails show Hunter using trips with his Dad to arrange meetings with business associates like Magnani. Indeed, in one exchange with Magnani, Hunter complains that he is not getting responses on his business dealings, objecting

“I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration and then you go completely silent,. I don’t know what it is that I did but I’d like to know why I’ve delivered on every single thing you’ve ever asked – and you make me feel like I’ve done something to offend you.”

The cringeworthy email only adds to the embarrassment not of Hunter Biden but Merrick Garland who continues to refuse the obvious need for a special counsel. Indeed, the public could raise the objection raised by Hunter: what does it take?

July 28, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | 1 Comment

TUCKER CARLSON ON OPIOIDS, COVID AND ANTIDEPRESSANTS

TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT | JULY 25, 2022

Tucker Carlson reveals the shocking side effects of antidepressants and calls out Democrats for not holding Big Pharma accountable. His full opinion piece can be read here: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-drugs-not-answer-every-human-problem

July 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment