Tag: corruption

See every stock trade House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband has made since 2021

As members of Congress debate whether lawmakers and their spouses should play the stock market, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, a venture capitalist, continues to regularly buy and sell stocks and stock options.

Pelosi has access to confidential intelligence and the power to affect — with words or actions — the fortunes of companies in which her husband invests and trades.

When asked in December 2021 whether members of Congress should even be allowed to trade stocks, Pelosi answered in the affirmative.

“We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” she said.

This led some of her colleagues, on both the left and the right, to sharply criticize her — and draft legislation to restrict members of Congress and their spouses from trading stocks.

“Year after year, politicians somehow manage to outperform the market, buying and selling millions in stocks of companies they’re supposed to be regulating,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said. “Wall Street and Big Tech work hand-in-hand with elected officials to enrich each other at the expense of the country. Here’s something we can do: ban all members of Congress from trading stocks and force those who do to pay their proceeds back to the American people. It’s time to stop turning a blind eye to Washington profiteering.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, introduced a similar bill alongside Sen. Mark Kelly with the intent to ban members of Congress and their families from trading stocks.

“Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make federal policy and have extraordinary access to confidential information,” Ossoff said.

Pelosi has since softened her stance, but the fate of a congressional stock-trade ban remains unclear.

A previous analysis from Insider estimated that the Pelosis are worth at least $46,123,051, making Nancy Pelosi one of the 25 richest members of Congress. The vast majority of the couple’s wealth is derived from stocks, options, and investments made by Paul Pelosi.

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Corruption inquiry witness is found DEAD in an office two days after he gave evidence about seeing a $10,000 cash payment being exchanged

A former councillor has been found dead in his office days after telling NSW’s anti-corruption watchdog he regretted not reporting one of his colleagues who accepted $10000 from developers.    

Clifton Wong, who served as a councillor on Hurstville City Council from 1999 to 2012, was found by emergency services in a Sydney inner-west office complex, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. 

The time of death is thought to be about was about 1.20pm on Wednesday 

Police said there were no suspicious circumstances in the 62-year-old man’s death.

Wong was appearing before a probe into former Hurstville and Georges River councillors Con Hindi and Vince Badalati, and former Hurstville councillor Philip Sansom and their dealings with developers.

Wong had been named as a person of interest along with Mr Hindi, Mr Badalati and Mr Sansom when the inquiry commenced in November but was no longer considered one when he took the stand.  

Wong told the Independent Commission Against Corruption on June 28 he witnessed a developer hand then-deputy mayor Mr Hindi mayor $10,000 to help with a potential development.

In his testimony Wong said the money was from developers Wensheng Liu and Philip Uy to favour their bid to buy a council-owned car park. 

Wong expressed remorse when asked on Monday why he hadn’t said anything at the time.

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Former NIH Chief Is Now Highest Paid Member Of Most Expensive White House Staff Ever

When Francis Collins departed as Director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) in December 2021, his legacy included multiple-millions of dollars in secret royalty payments to himself, prominent colleagues like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and hundreds of other scientists, officials, and researchers working under him.

Today, Collins is the highest paid adviser to the president with the most expensive White House staff ever, according to data compiled by the Chicago-based non-profit government watchdog, Open The Books (OTB).

Collins is paid $300,000 annually as the Acting Science Adviser to President Joe Biden. The new salary represents a 47 percent increase over the $203,500 annual compensation Collins made as NIH Director for 12 years. All salary figures were obtained by OTB under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Earlier this year, The Epoch Times first reported that OTB uncovered more than 1,600 NIH officials, scientists, and researchers who received an estimated $350 million in secret royalty payments from sources outside the government that the agency refuses to identify.

The payments were made between 2010 and 2020, including all but a couple of years of Collins’ tenure.

“We also find that during this period, leadership at NIH was involved in receiving third-party payments. For instance, Francis Collins, the immediate past director of NIH, received 14 payments. Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 payments, and his deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight payments,” OTB President Adam Andrzejewski told The Epoch Times.

Collins’ successor as NIH Director, Dr. Lawrence Tabak, admitted to Congress in May that the secret royalty payments have “the appearance of a conflict of interest,” but he claimed the agency has sufficient internal safeguards to prevent abuse.

Federal personnel law and regulations bar government employees from having either actual conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts in their decision-making as public servants.

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Trouble brews: Audit finds ex-mayor Bill de Blasio cooked books to hide $224M between 2015-2021

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has been accused by the city’s comptroller of using gimmicky accounting tricks to “hide” nearly $250 million in costs for a heavily subsidized ferry system that had reportedly been used primarily by the wealthy.

“We rely on the city to be honest in how much things cost so that we can make clear, shared decisions about where the money is going. When hide-the-ball is played with any amount — certainly with a quarter of a billion dollars — you can’t have confidence that your city is providing the truth,” comptroller Brad Lander said at a press conference Wednesday.

His remarks came after his release of a devastating 50-page audit that outlined issue after issue after issue with the city’s ferry service.

The audit found that the Economic Development Corporation, the agency that runs the ferry network, “did not disclose over $224 million in expenditures as ferry-related in its audited financial statements.”

For instance, the EDC “understated the City’s subsidy for the ferry operations by $2.08, $2.10, $3.98 and $4.29 for Fiscal Years 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively.”

In 2020, the city spent $14.57 per every ride, yet reported only spending $10.59. Meanwhile, the mostly wealthy “residents, commuters, tourists, and leisure riders” who used the ferry service paid only $2.75 per ticket.

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How the Media Secretly Carries Out Assignments for the CIA

The June 21, 2022, Grayzone article,1 “British Security State Collaborator Paul Mason’s War on ‘Rogue Academics’ Exposed,” shines a great big light on what the “anti-disinformation” industry is really all about.

Spoiler alert: It has nothing to do with protecting a gullible public from information that might cause them to make bad or unhealthy choices. No, it’s about creating and directing a narrative for the purpose of controlling the population and hiding truths that might overthrow the ruling cabal and its plans for a one world government.

Operation Mockingbird

Propaganda is as old as humanity itself, but the modern version of it can be traced back to 1948, when the CIA’s Office of Special Projects2 launched Operation Mockingbird,3,4 a clandestine CIA media infiltration campaign that involved bribing hundreds of journalists to publish fake stories at the CIA’s request.

The CIA reportedly spent $1 billion a year (about one-third of its entire budget5) on this enterprise. CIA-recruited journalists worked in most major news organizations, including CBS News, Time, Life, Newsweek and The New York Times, just to name a few.6 Later on, the campaign expanded to include foreign media as well.7 As reported by the Free Press:8

“In 1976, Senator Frank Church’s investigation into the CIA exposed their corruption of the media … The tactic was straightforward. False news reports or propaganda would be provided by CIA writers to knowing and unknowing reporters who would simply repeat the falsehoods over and over again.”

During the Cold War, CIA propaganda disparaged communist ideologies. Today, it promotes radical ideas that bring us closer to The Great Reset — which is based on a technocratic economic system — instead.

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33 Problems With Media In One Chart

One of the hallmarks of democratic society is a healthy, free-flowing media ecosystem.

In times past, that media ecosystem would include various mass media outlets, from newspapers to cable TV networks. Today, the internet and social media platforms have greatly expanded the scope and reach of communication within society.

Of course, journalism plays a key role within that ecosystem. High quality journalism and the unprecedented transparency of social media keeps power structures in check—and sometimes, these forces can drive genuine societal change. Reporters bring us news from the front lines of conflict, and uncover hard truths through investigative journalism.

That said, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley and Carmen Ang detail below, these positive impacts are sometimes overshadowed by harmful practices and negative externalities occurring in the media ecosystem.

The graphic above is an attempt to catalog problems within the media ecosystem as a basis for discussion. Many of the problems are easy to understand once they’re identified. However, in some cases, there is an interplay between these issues that is worth digging into. Below are a few of those instances.

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The Fed Is Quietly Handing Out $250 Million To A Handful Of Happy Recipients Every Single Day

The Fed’s QE may be over, and QT may be just starting (it won’t last long), but don’t think the Fed free money giveaway is ending any time soon. In fact, for a handful of happy, mostly anonymous counterparties, the real free-money bonanza has just begun!

Case in point: the Fed’s reverse repo facility. While one can debate for hours why there is a record $2.330 trillion in cash parked at the Fed’s overnight facility and what it means for systemic plumbing problems, the fact is that there is a record $2.33 trillion in cash parked at the Fed’s overnight facility, doing nothing.

Well not nothing: it was nothing when rates were zero, but at 1.55% which is the current reverse repo rate, that $2.33 trillion is a golden goose for the 108 counterparties that are parking cash at the facility, a mixture of money market funds, banks, GSEs and various other financial intermediaries.

How big is this particular Golden Goose? The chart below shows the payment in interest that the Fed makes day on this record $2.33 trillion in funds: as of today it amounts to just over $100 million every single day! That’s right, more than $100 million in interest payments on funds parked with the Fed, which is by definition the world’s only risk-free counterparty!

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Media And Fact Checkers Caught Erasing All Evidence Of Hillary Clinton “Covering Up” Pedophile Ring at State Department

The Pizzagate topic has been one of great controversy, and for good reason – if true, the implications of the allegations are huge. It would shatter our illusions of powerful people including Presidents, high ranking politicians and those we trust to run our countries. These people would be, under the definitions of our systems, criminals committing heinous and unforgivable crimes.

So is there any truth to the allegations? Mainstream media has been operating as a branch of the Democrat Party’s PR department for years now, so there is no point listening to them about anything. But there was a time in the past when the occasional nugget of truth would be allowed to slip out between the wall-to-wall propaganda.

Take, for instance, this NBC news report that Hillary Clinton, while she was Obama’s secretary of state, shut down an investigation into an elite pedophile ring in the State Department. According to the report presented by Chuck Todd, Clinton shut down the investigation in order to avoid scandal and protect the careers of high ranking officials.

NBC even provided internal State Department memos to back up claims of the Hillary Clinton elite pedophile ring cover-up.

The NBC News report is disturbing enough, but what happened after NBC broadcast news of the Clinton “cover up” is perhaps even more disturbing.

The network deleted the footage and social media networks blacklisted the video from their platforms. Chuck Todd, who presented the report, has refused thousands of requests for comment. Nobody at NBC or the mainstream media wants to acknowledge the report even went to air.

And it gets even worse. Fact checkers including Politifact and Factcheck.org and have been employed to deny the undeniable, claiming as one that NBC did not report that Hillary Clinton “covered up” evidence of a pedophile ring in the State Department.

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FOIAs Reveal Progressive Money Fueling FBI, DOJ, Leftist Activist and Election Official Coordination

A strange constellation has emerged through public records requests of coordination between progressive funders, federal authorities, corporations, state election officials, and leftist organizations.

Freedom of information requests have uncovered oddball and opaque relationships between some state election officials, federal officials, corporations, progressive activists, and those trying to influence the conduct of those same election officials. These relationships extend to junkets that include baseball games, travel, and even data exchanges between state officials and outside progressive groups.

The story begins with a series of freedom of information act requests aimed at a number of states to see if any election officials are tempted to apply for now-illegal money from the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life. Such grants and the wild expenditures of these funds altered the course of the 2020 election. (Read The Real Kraken, What Really Happened to Donald Trump in the 2020 Election at PJ Media.)

The FOIAs were submitted by the Public Interest Legal Foundation—with which I am associated—and were aimed broadly at election officials across the United States.

While no election official in a state that now prohibits private funding of elections has applied for new funding, something stranger, and more dangerous has emerged from the public information requests.

In one email, we find that the Democracy Fund—a hyper-funded progressive money source—is organizing state officials and third parties to discuss election administration.

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