Friday, October 15, 2021

JOE BIDEN'S CRONY MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOSHEAD BEZOS OF AMAZON SAYS THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE AN HONEST PROFIT - THAT'S WHY I VOTED FOR JOE!

  OBAMA-BIDENOMICS IS TRICKLE UP ECONOMICS FOR THEIR

 CRONIES WHO KICK BACK SOME TO THE 

LYING LAWYERS WHO ABETTED THEM


Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.


THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK JUST GOT DARKER, LABOR FORCE VANISHING, DIRE PRICE INCREASES WILL CONTINUE





Rigged: Investigation Finds Amazon Brands and Exclusives Hold Top Spot in 7 Out of 10 Product Searches

Jeff Bezos of Amazon laughing
Alex Wong/Getty
3:57

According to a recent report, e-commerce giant Amazon purposefully ranks its own products above other higher-rated competitors on its platform. According to an investigation by the Markup, “We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results.”

Breitbart News recently reported that according to internal documents, e-commerce giant Amazon has been developing knockoff products and manipulating search results to promote its own product lines. Documents show that the company’s private-brands team in India exploited internal data obtained from its marketplace in the country to identify popular products sold by other companies and then create copies to compete against them.

Amazon Employee, Warehouse

Amazon Employee, Warehouse (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)

Now, the Markup reports that Amazon sellers in the United States are describing similar experiences. The Markup spoke to Robert Gomez, the founder of the Atlanta-based consumer goods startup 4Q Brands and the owner of the Kaffe coffee grinder brand. Gomez claimed that after refining photos and descriptions of his coffee grinder, amazing positive reviews, and paying the e-commerce giant $40,000 a month in advertising, his product finally became top-ranked on Amazon’s platform.

However, Amazon then introduced its own competing coffee grinders from its house brand Amazon Basics and another from a brand that sells exclusively on Amazon, DR Mills. Gomez stated that the items from the other brands ranked well immediately, appearing amount the top-three results for “coffee grinder” on the platform. Gomez stated: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.” In fact, an investigation by the Markup found that Amazon brands and exclusives held the top spot in seven out of ten product searches.

The Markup writes:

An investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors—even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews.

We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. (We only analyzed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.)

The Markup found Amazon placed its Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch cereal, with four stars and 1,010 reviews, in the number one spot ahead of cereals with better and more reviews including Cap’n Crunch (five stars, 14,069 reviews), Honey Bunches of Oats (five stars, 5,205 reviews), and Honey Nut Cheerios (five stars, 11,702 reviews). A vacuum cleaner from Amazon’s exclusive Noisz brand was placed on top, ahead of models from Bissell, Eureka, and Hoover with higher ratings and more reviews. And the Amazon-exclusive Concept 3sneaker from Skechers placed number one, four spots ahead of a similar but not exclusive to Amazon Skechers sneaker with the same star rating but 77 times more reviews.

The Markup’s investigation found that Amazon-branded products overall receive an outsized portion of top spots in search results, completely out of line with their proportion of the sample.

Read more at the Markup here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com



Indian Retailers Demand Investigation of Amazon Market-Rigging Scandal

ROMEOVILLE, IL - AUGUST 01: Workers pack and ship customer orders at the 750,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center on August 1, 2017 in Romeoville, Illinois. On August 2, Amazon will be holding job fairs at several fulfillment centers around the country, including the Romeoville facility, in an attempt to hire more …
Scott Olson/Getty Images
6:05

A group representing millions of Indian retailers on Thursday demanded a government investigation of Amazon.com following a Reuters report that accused the online retail behemoth of manipulating search results to privilege its own knockoff brands over Indian retail merchandise.

“Amazon is causing a great disadvantage to the small manufacturers. They are eating the cake that is not meant for them,” Praveen Khandelwal of the Confederation of All India Traders told Reuters on Thursday.

Reuters quoted an Indian official calling for a nationwide boycott of Amazon, and a fiery blog post from a nonprofit called the Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) that said Amazon’s behavior was “highly deplorable and brings into question the credibility of Amazon as a good faith operator in the Indian startup ecosystem.”

The report that prompted these outraged reactions accused Amazon of creating knockoffs of Indian products, then manipulating its search results so customers saw the knockoffs as featured products before seeing the original items.

An employee places packed goods tons container at the distribution center of US online retail giant Amazon in Moenchengladbach, on December 17, 2019. (Photo by INA FASSBENDER / AFP) (Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)

An employee places packed goods tons container at the distribution center of US online retail giant Amazon in Moenchengladbach, Germany, on December 17, 2019. (Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)

CNBC explained that Amazon does not take the crude and obvious tactic of making its own branded products appearing first in search results; instead, it allegedly uses “search seeding” tactics to ensure its products appear near the top, then calls consumer attention to them with “sparkles” or on-screen banners. 

Amazon has been accused of doing this sort of thing in other markets, but Reuters reviewed “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents” that described a vast and meticulously-planned campaign to muscle Indian retailers out of their own market, which happens to be one of Amazon’s biggest growth opportunities:

Among the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt brand in India, John Miller, which is owned by a company whose chief executive is Kishore Biyani, known as the country’s “retail king.” Amazon decided to “follow the measurements of” John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document states.

The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns. The aim: to identify and target goods – described as “reference” or “benchmark” products – and “replicate” them. As part of that effort, the 2016 internal report laid out Amazon’s strategy for a brand the company originally created for the Indian market called “Solimo.” The Solimo strategy, it said, was simple: “use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.”

The Solimo project in India has had international impact: Scores of Solimo-branded health and household products are now offered for sale on Amazon’s U.S. website, Amazon.com.

One of the Amazon documents referred to the expertise of original manufacturers – which Amazon’s “partnership” employees were allegedly sent to study and duplicate – as “tribal knowledge.”

Reuters said the Amazon documents laid out a “formal, clandestine strategy” to imitate Indian retail products and manipulate search results. These are both activities that Amazon executives – including founder Jeff Bezos – have repeatedly sworn to Congress under oath that the company would never engage in.

CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos (R) lights a traditional lamp along with Amit Agarwal (3L), senior vice president and country manager for Amazon India, during the Amazon's annual Smbhav event in New Delhi on January 15, 2020. (Photo by Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images)

CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos (R) lights a traditional lamp along with Amit Agarwal (3L), senior vice president and country manager for Amazon India, during Amazon’s annual Smbhav event in New Delhi on January 15, 2020. (Photo by Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images)

Bezos specifically stated in July 2020 that Amazon has “a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business,” but added that he could not “guarantee that policy has never been violated.” The Reuters expose suggested it was violated with gusto in India by some fairly high-level Amazon personnel.

“It’s worth noting that Amazon has on multiple occasions, including during formal hearings, denied any wrongdoing that involves making use of consumer data to drive advantage for its own brands and products,” the ADIF said in its blog post on Thursday:

Amazon taking advantage of consumer data that they are in possession of, using that information to the detriment of the brands and sellers that helped generate the data in the first place, and then rigging search results to further hurt the original brands is an economic offence of the highest order, one that has destructive consequences for markets and falls foul of fair competition practices.

“The unfiltered insight the documents offer into Amazon’s aggressive use of its market power could intensify the legal and regulatory pressure the company is facing in many countries,” Reuters predicted.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) quickly responded to the Reuters report by demanding the breakup of Amazon:

The Economic Times noted that even before the Reuters expose was published, some Hindu media outlets were comparing Amazon to the East India Company – the corporate supervillains of the British colonial era – while a whistleblower accused Amazon of bribing Indian officials.

The Economic Times suggested Amazon could be attacked from several quarters of Indian politics because the Diwali holiday season is coming up, the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic is receding, and the battle for Indian consumer spending will likely be fierce. Furthermore, there is considerable anxiety in India about foreign companies seeking to destabilize the economy.

When Reuters invited Amazon to respond to its story on Wednesday, the company replied that it could not “confirm the veracity” of the documents Reuters obtained but said it believed the allegations in the report were “factually incorrect and unsubstantiated,” without explaining why.

Amazon insisted to Reuters that it displays its search results “based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not.”

Amazon’s response also repeated Bezos’ assertion that company policy “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of non-public, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”


BEZOSHEAD CAN'T MAKE AN HONEST PROFIT. LIKE JOE BIDEN, HE HAS TO STEAL IT!

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

Report: Amazon Internal Documents Show Company Copied Popular Products, Rigged Search Results

Jeff Bezos holds up an Amazon device
David Ryder /Getty
2:18

A recent report claims that internal Amazon documents show that the company created knockoff items and manipulated search results to promote its own product lines in India.

Reuters reports that according to internal documents, e-commerce giant Amazon has been developing knockoff products and manipulating search results to promote its own product lines. Reuters reports that the documents show that Amazon’s private-brands team in India exploited internal data obtained from its marketplace in the country to identify popular products sold by other companies and then create copies to compete against them.

Jeff Bezos India speech

Jeff Bezos India speech (Amazon/YouTube)

AURORA, CO - MAY 03: A worker moves packed boxes at the Amazon fullfillment center May 3, 2018 in Aurora, Colorado. The million square foot facility, employing 1,000 fulltime employees, has over 2 million products ready to ship to customers globally. (Photo by Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images)

AURORA, CO – MAY 03: A worker moves packed boxes at the Amazon fullfillment center May 3, 2018 in Aurora, Colorado. The million square foot facility, employing 1,000 fulltime employees, has over 2 million products ready to ship to customers globally. (Photo by Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images)

The private-brand team also reportedly altered Amazon’s search results so that Amazon-owned brands would appear “in the first 2 or three … search results” according to a strategy report from 2016. Some of the brands that were copied including the popular shirt brand John Miller, which is owned by a company whose CEO Kishore Biyani is known as India’s “retail king.”

Amazon reportedly chose to “follow the measurements” of John Miller shirts down to the exact neck circumference and sleeve length, essentially creating Amazon-branded copies.

Internal documents show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data from other brands on Amazon.in with the aim of identifying and targeting goods that could be used as a “reference” or “benchmark” products that Amazon could “replicate.”

This is far from the first time Amazon has been accused of similar practices. In 2020, Breitbart News reported that the e-commerce giant set up meetings with startup firms to discuss their products with the pretense of potentially investing in the companies, only later to launch competing products in similar markets.

In April of 2020 Amazon was accused of doing exactly what the latest documents from Reuters appear to show, that the company was using data and sales figures to target products sold by third parties and then creating their own versions.

Read more at Reuters here.

 OBAMA-BIDENOMICS IS TRICKLE UP ECONOMICS FOR THEIR

 CRONIES WHO KICK BACK SOME TO THE 

LYING LAWYERS WHO ABETTED THEM


THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK JUST GOT DARKER, LABOR FORCE VANISHING, DIRE PRICE INCREASES WILL CONTINUE




It’s Happening: Global Elites Plotting to Destroy Americans’ Personal Wealth

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The following content is sponsored by Brownstone Research.

As the world’s economy emerges from the crisis caused by the pandemic, global elites have pushed for a “Great Reset.” Brownstone Research founder Jeff Brown spoke with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow about the implications of this globalist vision for ordinary investors and how Brownstone Research’s personalized “Great Reset Protection Plan” provides all the tools investors need to protect themselves against these destructive market forces.

Though the pandemic has pushed talk of the Great Reset into broader political discourse, Brown explained that the idea is much older. The phrase originated with Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 2014. But, as Brown noted, “Philosophically, this has been going on for thousands of years.”

“The powerful and the elites of the world have always tried to impose their will and signal their virtue to society obviously at their own benefit, not the benefit for the general population,” Brown said.

However, he noted that the pandemic has only accelerated this globalist push, as governments and corporations have exercised unprecedented power over individuals.

Brown framed the Great Reset as part of the trend of “woke capitalism,” which he described as “the corporate version of virtue signaling.”

He explained that we can see the Great Reset in action in the corporate world’s embrace of ESG investing, which stands for “Environmental, Social, and Governance.”

“ESG is one the largest themes in the corporate world right now, as companies try to rebrand themselves,” he said. “And it’s all about money and perception in the sense that even large institutional funds on Wall Street are trying to reposition themselves as being good, raising trillions of dollars of funds only to be invested in ESG approved companies. And, of course, companies are excited to rebrand themselves so that they have access to that kind of capital and those types of investors.”

“From my perspective, a very perverse loop is happening right now that is actually feeding into what those behind the Great Reset are trying to accomplish,” Brown added.

“What is their goal? What is the objective for some of these global elites?” Marlow asked.

“Obviously it’s almost always about money and power,” Brown said. “By imposing controls, they can impose and control the flow of capital into places they see fit, not where we, as taxpayers or citizens, feel is appropriate. If you control the flows of money, obviously you can benefit. They have the added benefit in their eyes of being perceived to be doing good for the world and the perception that they know better about what’s good for us and that they’re steering things in the right direction.”

“But this will absolutely exacerbate the types of inequalities and problems that we see around the world today, rather than solving them,” Brown cautioned. “And the Great Reset, of course, always leaves out one key point: How is the world going to pay for all of these grand visions?”

“Do you know the answer?” Marlow asked.

“They’re going to print a lot more money,” Brown answered. “And what that means is the value of our dollars or our euros or our yen will be quickly devalued and depreciated over shorter periods of time.”

“I know that if folks go over to JeffBrownReset.com, you give them a comprehensive plan on how to deal with this in their personal life,” Marlow said. “What can we be doing to guard against this on an individual basis?”

“My overarching goal is to help normal investors protect against these types of things,” Brown explained. “We try to stack the deck in favor of normal people and give them the same advantages, if not more, than the insiders on Wall Street. And any time we’re living in these types of highly inflationary, very radical progressive monetary policy periods, things like fixed assets are important.”

“If we outpace inflation, then our real return on investments will be greater than a government’s ability to devalue the currency,” he added. “So, what I really try to convey to my subscribers are investing in ways that can do exactly that — that can grow their assets at rates that are much faster than inflation.”

Sign up for Jeff Brown’s “Great Reset Protection Plan” HERE. Learn more at JeffBrownReset.com.

ECONOMY HEADS INTO CHAOS AS MARKETS SOAR - AUTO INDUSTRY IN DEPRESSION - HOMEBUYERS PRICED OUT




ECONOMY HAS ALREADY CRASHED MARKET IS NEXT - INVESTORS CRUSHED LIKE

COCKROACHES - RESTAURANTS DYING







BIDEN'S CRONY MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOSHEAD BEZOS IS DOIN' GOOD! REAL GOOD! HE  KNEW HE WOULD BECAUSE HE  HELPED MARK ZUCKERBERG PUT BIDEN IN THE WHITE HOUSE.



The richest Americans became 40% richer during the pandemic

The Forbes 400 – who have each accumulated at least $2.9bn – added $4.5tn to their wealth

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.
Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

The 400 richest Americans added $4.5tn to their wealth last year, a 40% rise, even as the pandemic shuttered large parts of the US, according to Forbes magazine’s latest tally of the country’s richest people.

The Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, retained top spot for a fourth consecutive year with a net worth of $201bn, followed by Elon Musk of Tesla and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, with net worths of $190.5bn and $134.5bn respectively.

The ranks of the super rich were swollen by 44 newcomers, the highest number since 2007, among them Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bitcoin billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of the Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna.

Miriam Adelson, wife of the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, was the richest newcomer, with $30.4bn. The youngest newcomer was the 29-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, the second-richest new entrant, with an estimated $22.5bn.

To make the list, people now have to have a minimum net worth of $2.9bn, up $800m from a year ago.

The pandemic initially triggered a record-setting wave of layoffs. The job market has recovered significantly but the economic impact of the coronavirus is still shaking large parts of the US economy. States are bracing for an avalanche of evictions after the expiration of federal protections.

Stock markets and property prices have continued to soar, trends that have disproportionately padded the wealth of the richest.

“Despite the uncertainty and the ever-changing market economy, the 2021 Forbes 400 shows that America’s wealthiest have grown far richer,” said Kerry Dolan, assistant managing editor, wealth at Forbes.

But not all of the wealthy have had a good pandemic. Former president Donald Trump has dropped off the Forbes 400 for the first time. Trump’s estimated $2.5bn fortune is $400m short of this year’s cutoff, according to Forbes.

The magazine calculates that the pandemic hit to Trump’s portfolio of big-city properties shrank his fortune by $600m. Trump had an opportunity to offload those assets at the start of his presidency.

“If Trump is looking for someone to blame, he can start with himself,” said Forbes.

Richest 25 Americans reportedly paid ‘true tax rate’ of 3.4% as wealth rocketed

This article is more than 3 months old

ProPublica investigation shows how little US super-rich, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, reportedly paid between 2014 and 2018

Elon Musk, who Forbes estimates is worth $151bn. ProPublica reported that Musk paid 3.27% over the four-year period.
Elon Musk, who Forbes estimates is worth $151bn. ProPublica reported that Musk paid 3.27% over the four-year period. Photograph: Alexander Becher/EPA
 in New York

The 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018, according to an investigation by ProPublica, despite their collective net worth rising by more than $400bn in the same period.

The report by the non-profit news organization exposes the US tax system as income and wealth inequality continues to widen.

ProPublica used Internal Revenue Service data to dive into the tax returns of some of America’s wealthiest and most prominent people. It found that in 2007 Bezos, the founder of Amazon and already a billionaire, paid no federal taxes. In 2011, when he had a net worth of $18bn, he was again able to pay no federal taxes – and even received a $4,000 tax credit for his children.

Last year, Bezos’s net worth topped $200bn.

ProPublica created what it called a “true tax rate” for the wealthiest 25 Americans by comparing federal income tax paid between 2014 and 2018 to how their net worth increased on Forbes’ well-regarded rich list over the same period.

“The results are stark,” ProPublica wrote. “According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401bn from 2014 to 2018.

“They paid a total of $13.6bn in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.”

By contrast, the median American household paid 14% in federal taxes, ProPublica reported. The top income tax rate is 37% on incomes over $523,600 for single filers, having been reduced from 39.6% under Donald Trump.

ProPublica found that Buffett, founder of the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, paid $23.7m in taxes from 2014 to 2018, on a total reported income of $125m. But Buffett’s wealth grew by $24.3bn, meaning he had a “true tax rate” of 0.1%.

Bezos’s wealth grew by $99bn over the four-year period, but he paid a true tax rate of 0.98%, according to ProPublica. Musk and Michael Bloomberg paid 3.27% and 1.3% respectively.

The billionaires are not accused of illegal activity. But the rates expose the failures of America’s tax laws to levy increases in wealth derived from assets in the way wages – the prime source of income for most Americans – are taxed.

“America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people,” ProPublica reported. “Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by US laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.”

ProPublica did not not disclose how it had obtained the IRS information. It said reporters had spent months analyzing the data and would release more reports.

Bezos, the richest person in the world, “declined to receive questions”, ProPublica said.

Musk, who Forbes estimates is worth $151bn, had first replied to a query “with a lone punctuation mark: ‘?’”, ProPublica said, adding that he had not replied to further queries.

Bloomberg, who according to Forbes has a net worth of $59bn, told ProPublica he had paid the taxes he owed. A spokesman cited the billionaire’s philanthropic giving. “Taken together, what Mike gives to charity and pays in taxes amounts to approximately 75% of his annual income,” the spokesman said.

ProPublica said Buffett had defended his practices in an email.

“I continue to believe that the tax code should be changed substantially,” Buffett told ProPublica. He said that “huge dynastic wealth is not desirable for our society”.

Buffett, worth $96bn, has said 99% of his wealth will go to philanthropy “during my lifetime or at death”. In 2020, he donated about $2.9bn in Berkshire Hathaway stock to five charities, CNBC reported.

“I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing US debt,” Buffett said.

Joe Biden has proposed raising the top rate of income tax and increasing capital gains tax, though that would probably have little effect on the true tax rate paid by billionaires. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have pushed a “wealth tax” that would introduce a 3% tax on the net worth of the ultra rich. There seems little hope it will pass into law.

At least some of America’s richest people want to better tax wealth. Patriotic Millionaires, a group campaigning to increase taxes on the rich, said the ProPublica report demonstrated “how the richest 400 Americans end up owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined”.

“The ultra-wealthy get to pick and choose when and how they’re taxed,” Patriotic Millionaires said. “This is exactly why we need a strong, unavoidable wealth tax now.”


Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

It Took Biden to Prove the Swamp is Wide and Deep

Was Trump our last hope to drain it?

 

 18 comments

The late, great Angelo Codevilla (RIP), hardly the bombastic Donald J. Trump, offered a dire warning to Americans that the swamp (our ruling class) has pervaded nearly every aspect of American life. Republicans and conservatives in general must take heed or be permanently thrust into a minor party role. A menacing part of swampism is its absence of international borders as Mike Jones has articulated, Globalism belongs to a species of liberal thinking that deplores barriers to trade and disapproves strongly of borders…the key articulators of this movement now include not only Silicon Valley but also the military-intelligence complex, NGOs, and non-institutionalized protest groups whose global operations are facilitated by smartphones.”

Many of us find refuge in blaming our non-compos mentis current President. Sadly, the very system, from top to bottom and regardless of political affiliation, that derailed Donald Trump’s second term as President 45, has gleefully supported and defended Biden as their useful idiot. I have several friends who are never-Trumper Republicans, who I surmise voted against Trump and for Mr. Biden, regardless of his obvious and innumerable failings. Little did they know that the mean-tweeting Orange Man, who never did anything that wasn’t grand, boastful and beautiful, was our last hope against the Swamp becoming preeminent, possibly for our lifetimes.

When George W. Bush declared war on Afghanistan the evening of 9/11, 2001, one of his first squishy commitments was to hide credible information about our alleged friends, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Qatar, by neglecting to justly implicate them as enablers to Osama bin Laden’s terror strike on American soil. Fast forward twenty years and on 9/11 2021, as Codevilla pointed out before his death,” Bush would say to our nation about our patriotic American veterans, many of whom had gone to war for him, losing life or limb, “There's little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard of human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.” In an effort to virtue signal his presidency, Bushy 43rd’s theoretical allows him to easily separate a religion from its more extreme practitioners, but the preponderance of evidence washing up on America’s shore has beggared his deceit.

In his address on 9/11/21 to the American people, Bush bastardized America’s moral obligation, stating, “We also witnessed the darker forces of human nature: fear and anger, resentment and violence against Muslim Americans, true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion." Can we believe that the many incidences of radical Islamic violence in our own country represent G.W.’s assessment of Islamism as a peaceful religion? Lauren B. O’Brien, an intelligence analyst at the F.B.I.’s Counterterrorism Unit has said that, “The United States faces a more diverse, yet no less formidable, terrorist threat than that of 2001.” Examples include but are not limited to the Fort Hood terror attack where Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others; the terrorist attack that killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; a terrorist attack, consisting of a mass shooting and an attempted bombing by Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California…all done in the name of Allah. Our leaders haven’t a clue how to identify radical from peaceful Muslims.

Most Americans don’t recognize that the rot starts at the top. The Pelosi-Schumer rot. In fact, Schumer even warned incoming President Trump that it was dumb to take on the intelligence agency wing of the swamp to over Russia’s misinformation attempts to make him lose the election. We now know also about General Milley’s not-so-secret communique to the top CCP general, reassuring him he would call before we attacked China.

In a tribute to Codevilla, Julie Ponzi points to the long-time Republican foreign policy guru under Nixon and Ford: “Henry Kissinger wrote that America should only fight ‘wars that it could afford to lose’—as if there were really such a thing-- thus blurring important distinctions between war and peace. Intellectually crippled this way, U.S. military forces…have not aimed for victory.”

In addition to Bush showing his Swamp cards to America, Biden’s ham-handed withdrawal from Afghanistan left behind Americans and our true+ Afghan allies in addition to between $10 billion to $90 billion in equipment and arms, which should never have been relinquished to our enemies and for which we will never receive an accurate accounting. The raison d'être for this laissez faire approach is the military-industrial complex (MIC), a vital part of the Swamp, which since 9/11 has received trillions [with a T] of dollars in government contracts, which they’ve largely used to feather their own nests. Channeling an obvious Biden mentor, Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry about this equipment and armaments? We can just have our good friends in the MIC sell us more at an even higher price! Come on, man!”

In addition to the defense industry, the MIC is joined at the hip by our military’s top brass, many of whom go on to work for these defense industry players after retirement making many multiples of the sums they made in the armed services, now working as lobbyists, corporate executives or corporate directors/members/trustees. It is no wonder that so many of them worked against President 45’s reelection given his desire to cease America’s endless war in Afghanistan and bring all the weapons, munitions and equipment home along with Americans and Afghan supporters rather than leaving this cache there for our enemies and need the MIC’s help in replacing the equipment.

God forbid most Americans learn about these myriad Swamp failures because as Angela Kelly writes, “Our illustrious fourth branch of government is supposed to keep [all] politicians in line. The mainstream press runs cover for the Left in this country because, for the most part, they are the Left. The media consistently either fails to cover the Left’s scandals, or they quickly move on to hype a less deserving story.”

As Josiah Lippincott has warned, “This deep state is in control. It is clear that no populist elected leader can trust America’s security establishment. Senator Chuck Schumer warned President Trump on Rachel Maddow’s show in 2017, the intelligence community has “six ways from Sunday of getting back at you…The military establishment is gloating now and flexing its muscle. After the election, outgoing Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey admitted that the Pentagon and State Department had consistently lied to Trump about troop levels in Syria. Before he left office, Trump’s order to have troops out of Afghanistan by January 15 was overruled by the establishment. Trump, far from trying to start a war on his way out of office, sought to end one. As Chinese tech magnate, Jack Ma Yun said recently, “You are under the government’s thumb.” Apparently in America too, Jack!

We should remember George Orwell’s 1984 alarm, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears…freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The Swamp’s two plus two equalizing whatever they want it to be must not continue to hollow out America! An almighty housecleaning is in order in 2022 and beyond.

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

A Party Without a President Goes to War

AND BRINGS BEZOSHEAD ALONG TO MAKE A FEW BUCKS!

Biden’s weakness fuels a Democrat civil war.

 

 15 comments

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

While the White House functions as the most expensive nursing home in the world, Capitol Hill is in a state of war, not between Democrats and Republicans, but a Dem on Dem fiscal war.

Normally a majority party with its guy in the Oval Office would turn to the administration to broker a deal, but the word is that Biden is “keeping a careful distance” from the battle. That’s sensible since Biden just got rolled by the Taliban and the French: he’s not up for the only thing that any government official will fight to the death for, not honor or country, but money.

Biden is the weakest man in the White House in a century. It’s not just age, which makes him a longshot for a second term, and has led to former opponents, many of them in the Senate, acting like they might run again in 2024, or a diminished mental capacity which precludes him from having much to say on anything except his love of ice cream and young girls.

After two generations in politics, people have yet to take Joe Biden seriously. Even sitting in the Oval Office, he’s a Rodney Dangerfield punchline who still can’t get any respect. There were a number of things weighing Biden down even long before his brain turned to jelly. He came out of one of America’s smallest states acting like he was presidential timber and humiliatingly blew his big shot with a plagiarism scandal. His corruption was legendary and politicians who are transparently for sale, like the Clintons, are generally seen as weak and easy to manipulate.

Mostly though Joe Biden was dumb. He had no ideas and the few ideas he had were terrible. The Senate is full of hacks, but Biden still stood out for sheer cluelessness and vanity. Biden is the only man in Washington D.C. to take himself seriously. That’s a power base of one.

BLOG EDITOR: THE OBOMB PICKED BIDEN BECAUSE JOE HAD LONG BEEN UP THE ASSES OF OBAMA'S CRONY BANKKSTERS. EVERYONE IN THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOY LAWYER ERIC HOLDER HAD A PROVEN RECORD OF SERVING THE BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS ON WALL STREET.

When Obama picked Biden, it wasn’t because he respected him. Just the opposite. Biden was the opponent whom he respected the least. Obama wanted the anti-Cheney, an idiot who would pose no threat, look good in photos, and whom no one could conceivably pick to replace him. (Biden, having learned that much from his old boss, used the same criteria to pick Kamala.)

Indeed, Obama respected Biden so much that he refused to back his incumbent VP for the top job in the Democrat primaries in 2016 and 2020, and ridiculed him in leaked media quotes.

What was the selling point for Biden’s presidential candidacy? We’re seeing it right now.

Untethered from the White House, Democrat factions backed by competing megadonors are fighting it out. The mice are playing because the cat’s not only away, he’s not really all there.

But it’s not just Biden.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has her job because she’s a pipeline to San Francisco’s donor class while Senator Schumer, her opposite number, is a pipeline to Wall Street. These aren’t legislative leaders, but two political hacks whose top skill is getting cash for their allies.

The trouble is that two can play at that game.

Lefty megadonors and business special interests are fighting over trillions in spending using the chess pieces they’ve funded over the years. And with narrow majorities, it doesn’t take much for the different factions, the radicals and the moderates, to take the entire process hostage.

On paper, the Democrats control the legislative and executive branches. In reality, they’re a house divided with no real leadership and no one able to have the final say. The real power has always belonged to staffers, but staffers work behind the scenes, they’re useless in a public power struggle. And the Democrats have no leadership and thus nothing but power struggles.

Legislative leaders like Pelosi and Schumer live in fear of lefties who control the culture. But their fear, of being primaried, of being drowned in cash from George Soros or Reed Hastings, is a non-issue to more moderate elected officials who operate out of red or purple states. And who have nothing but contempt for Pelosi and Schumer’s terror in the face of AOC’s Twitter account.

Weak leaders like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer can’t reliably run anything. And in the absence of leadership, the other organizing principles, ideology, media and social media consensus, have proven inadequate to actually get things done. Ideologues can’t tolerate dissent and have no idea how to cope with it except by trying to destroy the source. Unable to actually destroy Manchin, the lefties glower hatefully and mutter dire threats, but have no idea how to persuade.

The old club where deals were struck and trillions in tax dollars were traded depended on leaders who might be unspeakably corrupt, but whose word to other members was solid. Manchin has conclusively demonstrated that legislative Democrats lack such leaders and that instead of having a solid plan for moving forward, they’ve been trying to pass the buck.

Biden’s weakness has become an apt metaphor for the weakness of a Democrat leadership that consists of staffers and donors moving hollow pieces with titles around a chessboard. Biden was supposed to be the last of the old Democrat lions, but he proved to be an incontinent pussycat. And Schumer, who was billed as being canny, has come off as whiny and ineffectual, more eager to stave off primary challenges than make the big decisions. And that leaves Pelosi who combines the worst traits of Biden and Schumer with boundless arrogance and unlikability.

The Left planned out an agenda based on being an unstoppable force that would smash through all obstacles using political terror, media pressure campaigns, and gratuitous violations of political norms and laws. But the unstoppable force keeps running into obstacles, judicial decisions, moderate resistance, that don’t quite stop it, but do slow it down. And the Left’s conviction that it can go over or around any obstacle have left it unable to deal with reality.

Legislative bodies work on compromise and depend on leadership. The ability of radical staffers to engineer legislative coups is being challenged by the realities of procedure and process. A generation of radical staffers was able to set the agenda in the Obama and Biden administrations, but their congressional counterparts are being thwarted by the checks and balances of a legislative system that has far more restraints on its power than the White House.

And, unlike the White House, the Senate works around the privilege of individual members which made the Left’s plan to simply force its agenda through a self-destructive effort.

The Left hasn’t lost. It will, one way or another, get most of what it wants. But the inescapable lesson here is that lefties have plenty of donors and activists, but lack leaders. The Biden administration offers the perfect opportunity of a leaderless White House that can do anything, but lead on nothing. The more the chaos grows, the more Biden’s approval ratings fall.

And the more voters are likely to turn to strong leadership to replace Biden’s empty chair.

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

Joe Biden: Unfit for Office

 

By Gary M. Wilmott

Never in American history has a major political party nominated two candidates for president and vice-president who are so manifestly unfit for the elective offices they seek.

Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California: Kamala Harris. 

 

 

There’s some ‘serious regret’ over the election of Joe Biden




THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY

American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now. TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH

 

With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “own the United States.” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “organized crime family.”

LLOYD BILLIONGSLEY

IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/

 

RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs


America's Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy.



The Pandora Papers: How the world of offshore finance is still flourishing | Four Corners


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kPLpZN3I3A


'Pandora Papers' expose how world leaders and the ultra-rich move their money



LISTEN TO THIS WHITE HOUSE BULLSHIT THAT FAILS TO MENTION THE VAST FORTUNE JOE BIDEN HAS SALTED AWAY IN TRUSTS AND OTHER DEVICES ALL THROUGH PARASITE LAWYER SON HUNTER BIDEN'S DIRTY DEALS!!!


White House Reacts To Pandora Papers Exposing Secret Dealings Of Billionaires And World Leaders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjZawZCli-E


HOW MANY MUSLIM DICTATORS HAVE WE BANKROLLED 

AND FOR HOW LONG?

THESE FUCKERS WOULD STAB US IN THE BACK IN A NANO SECOND GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY

DO A SEARCH FOR GEORGE W BUSH'S PAYMASTERS, 

THE SAUDI INVADERS 9/11

THIS FUCKING DICTATOR OWNS $100 MILLION IN U.S. REAL ESTATE INCLUDING A $33 MILLION DOLLAR MALIBU MANSION


Pandora Papers Reveal Details Of Offshore Wealth Storage By World Leaders

The Jordanian Royal Palace responded to the report on Monday by stating there was nothing “unusual or improper” about King Abdullah’s real estate purchases, which it said were made with his own money, not funds from the government treasury......HeHeHe.... there is NO gov treasury except the money looted from the American people!!!

An early reaction from observers such as Oxfam International, a prominent charity organization, was that so many world leaders are busy making extravagant purchases and hiding vast troves of personal wealth while their countries are wrestling with underfunded social services or receiving international aid.

A REMINDER OF THE DANGERS OF LETTING A GAMING LAWYER IN THE WHITE HOUSE!

 

There it is.  That's the issue.  To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden.  They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years.  The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars.  How is this possible on his salary?  It's not.  So where did his wealth come from?  Not from being a brilliant businessman.                               DAVID PRENTICE

 

LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS, PATHOLOGICAL LIAR AT LARGE

https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/lawyer-kamala-harris-pathological-liar.html

Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything. DAVID KELTZ

He added, “When Hunter Biden is doing foreign deals, whether they are these deals in Beijing where he gets checks for $5 million and there’s no evidence he really did anything, or whether he’s putting together a painting and putting that up for sale, at the end of the day the way the business model works in the Biden family is that the finances are intertwined. Joe Biden will benefit one way or another from what they are doing. Let’s be clear, Hunter Biden’s friend, this gallery owner that is going to be selling his artwork, has spoken in the past about the desire to have ambitious plans to seek and find buyers in China.”

Kamala Harris Failed to Investigate Client of Husband’s Law Firm as California Attorney General  

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-bribes-suckers-senator-dianne.html

 

HARIS ALIC

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) failed as California’s attorney general declined to investigate faulty advertising claims against one of the nation’s leading nutritional supplement companies, which also happened to be a client of her husband’s law firm.

As California’s chief law enforcement officer between 2011 and 2017, Harris racked up a record as a tough on crime prosecutor. From cracking down on school truancy to opposing marijuana legalization—with more than 1900 people being prosecuted for possession of the drug under her tenure—Harris was California’s self-acknowledged “top cop.”

That record, however, did not extend to clients of Venable LLP, the law firm where Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was a high-profile partner. Harris, in particular, failed on numerous occasions to investigate the nutritional supplement giant Herbalife. At the time, Herbalife was a high-profile client of Venable, paying the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for its legal services every year.

Emails: Hunter Biden ‘Said He Has Access to Highest Level’ of Chinese Govt, According to Dem Donor

WENDELL HUSEBØ

Hunter Biden’s newest purported Libya email dump on Thursday, unrelated to his reported laptop cache, reveals the Biden family’s connections to the “highest level” in Communist China.

The emails by Hunter’s business contact indicate Hunter, “#2 son,” demanded a $2 million dollar retainer plus “success fees” to unfreeze assets in Libya frozen by the Obama-Biden administration. They also noted Hunter’s business relationship with former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, who founded with Hunter in 2009 Rosemont Seneca Partners, a billion-dollar private equity firm.

 

 

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden (L), John Kerry and stepson Chris Heinz (R). (Charles Dharapak, Lawrence Jackson/AP Photo)

The first Libya email is reportedly dated January 28, 2015, nearly two years before the end of the Obama-Biden administration.

“Per phone conversation I met with #2 son. He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people – it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not,” the email first read.

The email then described Hunter as an “alcoholic, drug addict” and “kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low-class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.”

But Hunter’s business contact, Democrat donor Sam Jauhari, said Hunter’s redemptive qualities where his connection to Chris Heinz and his “access to [the] highest level” in Communist China:

His positives are he is Chairman of UN World Food Program, son of #2 who has Libya file, access to State, Treasury, business partner SofS [Secretary of State] J. [John] Forbes K [Kerry] son and since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen. He said he has access to highest level in PRC [China], he can help there.

Another email from Thursday’s report indicates the deal progressed into the following year.

“They are interested in the project,” a Washington lawyer John Sandweg wrote Jauhari, “but emphasized that for them to get involved, the team (lobbyists, lawyers and PR) would need to be a small group of folks they have a tight relationship with.”

The White House, Jauhari, and Hunter’s attorney declined to comment on the Libya emails to Business Insider.

Though the deal appears to not have come to fruition, the emails reveal the Biden’s close ties to China.

Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer told Fox News in 2019 that Hunter traveled to China with Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two. Ten days after the trip, Rosemont Seneca received a $1.5 billion deal, which Schweizer believes was funded by Communist China:

While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal. That’s $1 billion with a “B,” later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government. It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.

Despite his lack of experience in financial matters, such as private equity or hedge funds, Hunter and Chris Heinz won the contract over the likes of the big banks.

“Any experience he [Hunter] has in private equity is certainly not the type that the Chinese would have interested in. And the bottom line here,” Schweizer continued, “is that in both the case of Ukraine and China, we have paper trails.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø 

Report: Hunter Biden Demanded $2 Million Plus ‘Success Fees’ to Unfreeze Libyan Assets

159AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

WENDELL HUSEBØ

23 Sep 20210

5:23

Hunter Biden reportedly demanded a $2 million retainer plus “success fees” to unlock Libyan assets frozen by the Obama-Biden administration, according to newly discovered emails obtained by Business Insider. Though President Joe Biden has claimed ignorance about Hunter’s family business schemes, the emails suggest otherwise.

“The first email, dated January 28, 2015, was sent from Sam Jauhari, a Democratic donor with businesses in the Persian Gulf, who was helping spearhead the Libya project,” Business Insider reported Thursday. “It was addressed to Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani, another Obama campaign donor involved in the proposal. In the email, Jauhari is frank about what Biden would bring to the table, and what he says Biden wanted in return”:

Per phone conversation I met with #2 son. He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people – it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not.

His positives are he is Chairman of UN World Food Program, son of #2 who has Libya file, access to State, Treasury, business partner SofS [Secretary of State] J. [John] Forbes K [Kerry] son and since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen. He said he has access to highest level in PRC [China], he can help there.

His negatives are that he is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.

We should meet in Gstraad or London to decide next steps.

As part of the deal, Jauhari and his partners were purportedly promised a five percent finder fee for unfreezing the Libyan funds, which could have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. It is unknown if Hunter’s “success fee” would have been carved out from the five percent finders fee.

It’s not the first time Hunter has been in contact with big-money individuals. According to Hunter’s own book, Hunter obtained a special meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II purportedly about Syrian refugees. The Los Angeles Times noted that the king took “the meeting only out of respect for Biden’s father, the American vice president.”

 

This picture, taken on March 15, 2014, shows a family at the sprawling desert Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan near the border with Syria which provides shelter to around 100,000 Syrian refugees. (Khalil Mazraawi/AFP via Getty Images)

“The only reason the king had agreed to meet,” Hunter wrote, “was out of respect for my dad. I guess you could chalk it up to nepotism, in the best possible way.”

 

In the second email, dated February 26, 2016, negotiations with Hunter apparently continued about unfreezing money in Libya.

According to Business Insider, “In it [the second email], Jauhari and al-Rahbani receive[d] a report by John Sandweg, a Washington lawyer who had served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama. Sandweg had reached out to Biden’s team about the Libya deal”:

I spoke with HB’s team yesterday. They are interested in the project, but emphasized that for them to get involved, the team (lobbyists, lawyers and PR) would need to be a small group of folks they have a tight relationship with. They do not want a large group involved and they only want people with whom they have a close relationship with due to the sensitivities surrounding their involvement.

Lawyer Sandweg confirmed to Business Insider he was communicating with the Biden team about unlocking assets in Libya. “They indicated they would consider it and I passed the message back,” Sandweg told the publication. “Jauhari wound up hiring a different law firm instead.”

 

Jauhari, the White House, and Hunter’s attorney declined to comment on the Libya emails.

It should be noted the Libya emails are not from Hunter’s laptop that the FBI is reportedly scouring for potential wrongdoing in which Hunter may have partaken.

Hunter’s Libya emails are the second bombshell to drop this week about Joe Biden’s family. According to Ben Schreckinger’s new book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, Hunter’s laptop material is genuine.

The book details “evidence that Hunter did ‘receive a 2015 email’ from an executive of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, ‘thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden,'” highlighting Joe’s direct involvement with Hunter’s business schemes.

Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer told Fox News in December 2020, the laptop’s hard drive suggests just how Joe Biden’s family operates in corrupt activities.

 

“In the emails that have come out as well, Hunter Biden is quite explicit. In one particular communication with his daughter, he’s basically complaining that he pays half of the entire family’s bills,” Schweizer said. “And he includes his mother and father in that and makes reference to pops.”

“So, the point is,” Schweizer continued, “all this enrichment that has been taking place is also flowing to Joe Biden indirectly through his son, but the fact of the matter is, he’s still a beneficiary, a direct beneficiary, of these foreign deals.”

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø 

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

 

Schweizer: Hunter Biden, Joe Biden Finances Are Illegally ‘Intertwined’

69

 

PAM KEY

Government Accountability Institute President and host of The Drill Down podcast Peter Schweizer, on Wednesday’s edition  Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” said the finances of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter are “intertwined,” which is not legal.

Ingraham said, “One of the scandals the media laughs off is the secretive selling of Hunter Biden’s lousy artwork. We know at some point in the coming weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars as written in The Atlantic will be funneled to the son of a sitting president, and none of us will know anything about who sent the money or where it originally came. From.”

She asked, “Peter, how likely is it that foreign buyers are going to be using this obvious opportunity to shove more money into Hunter’s pockets or other family members, mainly the president?”

Schweizer said, “I think it is very likely and if you go through the Hunter Biden emails, as I have been doing with the team for close to a year, scouring them. What you find out very quickly is that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s finances are intertwined. They are not separate entities. There are numerous examples of Hunter Biden is paying bills for his father. Which, by the way, is not legal. Politicians can get occasional gifts from family members, but you cannot subsidize the lifestyle of a politician. That is what Hunter Biden is doing.”

He added, “When Hunter Biden is doing foreign deals, whether they are these deals in Beijing where he gets checks for $5 million and there’s no evidence he really did anything, or whether he’s putting together a painting and putting that up for sale, at the end of the day the way the business model works in the Biden family is that the finances are intertwined. Joe Biden will benefit one way or another from what they are doing. Let’s be clear, Hunter Biden’s friend, this gallery owner that is going to be selling his artwork, has spoken in the past about the desire to have ambitious plans to seek and find buyers in China.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

 

LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS, PATHOLOGICAL LIAR AT LARGE

https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/lawyer-kamala-harris-pathological-liar.html

 

Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything. DAVID KELTZ

KAMALA HARRIS’ ASSAULT ON FREEDOM OF FAITH  -  WHAT WOULD SHE DO TO BELIEVERS AS PRESIDENT?

https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/why-does-lawyer-kamala-harris-hate.html

Harris’s most important contribution to the Supreme Court debate thus far has been her controversial attempt to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in 2018.

She insinuated that Kavanaugh was linked to Russian collusion — a claim so absurd that she was mocked by both of the major newspapers in her home state, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. Harris also drew criticism for a deceptively-edited video in which she falsely suggested Kavanaugh opposed birth control.

The best-case scenario is that she’s a progressive who repeatedly violated her own principles so that she could promote her career. In the worst-case scenario, she’s just another corrupt, rotten, regressive prosecutor.

                                                           JESSER HOROWITZ

Kamala Harris Failed to Investigate Client of Husband’s Law Firm as California Attorney General  

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-bribes-suckers-senator-dianne.html

 

HARIS ALIC

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) failed as California’s attorney general declined to investigate faulty advertising claims against one of the nation’s leading nutritional supplement companies, which also happened to be a client of her husband’s law firm.

As California’s chief law enforcement officer between 2011 and 2017, Harris racked up a record as a tough on crime prosecutor. From cracking down on school truancy to opposing marijuana legalization—with more than 1900 people being prosecuted for possession of the drug under her tenure—Harris was California’s self-acknowledged “top cop.”

That record, however, did not extend to clients of Venable LLP, the law firm where Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was a high-profile partner. Harris, in particular, failed on numerous occasions to investigate the nutritional supplement giant Herbalife. At the time, Herbalife was a high-profile client of Venable, paying the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for its legal services every year.

 

THIS IS FOR REAL!

Kamala Harris: ‘Joe Biden Has Been Incredibly Transparent’ with His Money

ROBERT KRAYCHIK

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) claimed during Wednesday’s vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City, UT, that Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden has been “incredibly transparent” about his personal finances.

Harris described Biden as “forthright” with his finances in response to a question posed to her and Vice President Mike Pence about the health of Biden and President Donald Trump given their ages – 77 and 74, respectively.

 

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government accountability Institute and author Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, has reported on Biden’s family’s financial ties to foreign governments and 

oligarchs. Weeks ago, he called for Senate 

Republicans to subpoena Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s

second son, to investigate financial dealings with 

foreign interests.

 

Schweizer has repeatedly outlined how the Biden family monetized the political influence of Joe Biden in his previous capacities as a senator and vice president.

Harris praised the New York Times‘s allegations that Trunp paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2015 and 2016 as “great investigative journalism.” She specifically defined “in debt” as if the audience needed an explanation of indebtedness:

We now know, because of great investigative journalism, that Donald Trump paid $750 in taxes. When I first heard about it, I literally said, You mean $750,000?’, and it was like, ‘No, $750.’ We now know Donald Trump owes and is in debt for $400 million dollars, and just so everyone is clear when when we say in debt, it means you owe money to somebody.

And it’d be really good to know who the President of the United States — the commander-in-chief — owes money to, because the American people have a right to know what is influencing the president’s decisions, and is he making those decisions on the best interest of the American people — of you — or self-interest. 

Harris stated, “So, Susan, I’m glad you asked about transparency, because it has to be across the board. Joe has been incredibly transparent over many, many years. The one thing we all know about Joe, he puts it all out there. He is honest, he is forthright, but Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been about covering up everything.”


Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.


Exclusive — Donald Trump on the Bidens: ‘It’s a Corrupt Family’

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

MATTHEW BOYLE

20 Aug 2020Washington, DC1,427

4:41

President Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively in the Oval Office last week that his general election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his entire family are “corrupt.”

Trump, the incumbent Republican, will face off against Democrat Biden in November. Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, will formally accept the Democrat nomination for president, thereby officially becoming the party’s presidential nominee at the Democrat National Convention on Thursday night.

In his Oval Office interview with Breitbart News last Monday, the president made clear that his opponent and his whole family are “corrupt,” as evidenced by not just Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Chinese Communist Party and Ukrainian oligarchs, but also other Biden family members, such as Biden’s brothers, James and Frank Biden and more.

Trump started by ripping into Hunter Biden for the $1.5 billion deal he cut with the Chinese. Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then the sitting vice president, to China on Air Force Two. Then just weeks later, he secured a $1.5 billion deal from the Bank of China, as Peter Schweizer—Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute president—has exposed. Hunter Biden also had a deal through Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, through which he made tens of thousands of dollars a month—even though he had never been to Ukraine before accepting the position. Joe Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma while his son Hunter worked for the firm.

“Hunter Biden came away with $1.5 billion, of which he gets big fees on. It’s not a possible thing to do,” Trump told Breitbart News in the Oval Office. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t—nobody has done that. Nobody has done that. China doesn’t do that. But he walked away in ten minutes with one-and-a-half-billion dollars. He gets fees on it. Ukraine, the same thing.”

But Hunter Biden’s questionable international dealings were not limited to China and Ukraine. As Schweizer’s most recent book, Profiles in Corruption, released earlier this year exposed, Hunter Biden’s firms had deals that secured hundreds of millions of dollars in other deals with the Chinese and with the Russians and Kazakhs as well.

“Other countries,” Trump said, noting next that the whole Biden family has been in on the graft: “The same thing for the family.”

Trump is correct about that. Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption exposed Biden’s two brothers, Frank and James, for various questionable deals in which they each engaged.

Despite having no experience whatsoever, Schweizer revealed this year that Frank was linked to $54 million in taxpayer loans from the Obama administration provided to help with U.S. relations in the Caribbean. Schweizer also revealed that Biden’s other brother, James, was employed at a firm to which the Obama administration funneled more than $1.5 billion in contracts over the course of Biden’s time in the nation’s second-highest office.

“It’s a corrupt family,” Trump told Breitbart News of the Bidens. “It’s a corrupt family, okay?”

In addition to Frank, James, and Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, is exposed in Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption as steering millions of dollars to a consulting firm she owned during her stints in her brother’s two previous presidential bids as his campaign manager. What’s more, Biden’s son-in-law, Howard Krein, who is married to Biden’s daughter Ashley, launched a firm from the Oval Office and repeatedly briefed investors privately, as Schweizer exposed in the book.

The president’s comments came in response to Breitbart News asking him about Biden’s attempts to frame him as weak on China, something that is hard to argue given the president’s and his administration’s work on the issue. Nonetheless, Biden’s team has tried to flip the script against Trump on China, something the president laughed at during his Oval Office interview as he laid out his successes in holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.

“Weak on China? He’s weak period,” Trump told Breitbart News. “Weak on China? China has never—they’ve paid us billions and billions of dollars. They were having the worst year ever that they’ve had in 67 years. Weak on China? Those guys were pathetic. If Biden got elected, they’d own the United States within a very short period of time. China would own the United States.”

 

Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.

Joe Biden Helped Launch Business for Son-in-Law from the Oval Office, Repeatedly Briefed Investors Privately

HARIS ALIC

Former Vice President Joe Biden went to great lengths to boost his son-in-law’s health care company while in the White House, briefing investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access to the Oval Office. The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite — a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.

In June 2011, Biden arranged a private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let alone develop a website.

The meeting was all the more surprising since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for health care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the nation’s commander-in-chief.

“Their status as a health care incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles in Corruption. “In fact, there were thirty-one similar companies operating in the state of California alone, and another eleven in the state of New York.”

As Schweizer outlines, the only significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter, Ashley. Krein, a head and neck doctor by training, seemed to have become an integral part of Biden’s inner-circle even before he officially wed into the family in June 2012.

One day after StartUp Health’s executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.

Regardless, the back-to-back events gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s co-founders succinctly put it.

The former vice president’s efforts on his son-in-law’s behalf were not just confined to the company’s launch. As Profiles in Corruption details, Biden went out of his way to ensure StartUp Health executives were given unparalleled access to the White House during the Obama presidency. The company’s leadership, which mostly consisted of Krein’s family and friends, frequently met with administration officials not only in private but also in public.

“According to 2011 White House visitors’ logs, Howard Krein attended the China State Dinner, a White House Staff barbecue, and President Obama’s Motown event,” Schweizer writes. “His brother, Steven, had half a dozen other meetings with White House officials.”

Biden’s efforts on behalf of the company expansively increased during his final year in office, both internationally and at home.

First, the vice president took Krein with him on Air Force Two to a conference on regenerative health hosted by Pope Francis at the Vatican in April 2016.

“Conference attendees included a who’s who of scientific researchers in medicine from around the world,” Schweizer notes.

Then in May, Krein was tasked with introducing his father-in-law at a major health industry data conference hosted by the Obama administration. The opportunity provided free publicity to the company as it planned to expand its portfolio.

In October 2016, Biden appeared alongside StartUp Health’s CEO at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation Summit. During his remarks, Biden praised StartUp Health as an innovator in the health care market and claimed companies like it would be essential to winning the battle against cancer.

Apart from arranging access and touting the company in public, Biden also took steps in the waning days of the Obama administration to boost investment in StartUp Health. In January 2017, Biden made one of his final appearances as vice president at a festival hosted by the company in San Francisco, California. At the event, Biden lauded StartUp Health’s success to 250 attendees, including members and prospective donors.

Ironically, at the same time he was working to promote his son-in-law’s business, Biden was also claiming his children had chosen careers unlikely to make them rich.

“I wish my kids would become wealthy,” Biden told the International Association of Fire Fighters in July 2012 while lambasting the economic policies of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.

 

 Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

 

 

Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.

Rep. Jim Banks Accuses Biden of Tax Avoidance ‘Hypocrisy’

 

NATE CHURCH

In a March 25 letter to the president, Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks called out Joe Biden’s tax avoidance “hypocrisy.”

Republican Study Committee Chairman Representative Jim Banks asked President Joe Biden whether he would put his proverbial money where his mouth is in regard to the tax avoidance Biden himself publicly criticized.

During remarks on Biden’s infrastructure plan, the president complained “millions of Americans lost their jobs last year while the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by $4 trillion,” saying “it just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become.”

In the March 25 letter, Banks asked Biden whether he would address the “legally dubious tax strategy” he said the president and his wife used to skirt roughly $500,000 in payroll taxes. Banks pointed out “S-corporations” used on Biden’s 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns, in which “[Biden] and the First Lady sheltered over $13 million” from taxes designed to support Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Banks wrote:

Press reports indicate that you both directed revenue from book royalties and speaking appearance fees into these two corporations avoiding self-employment payroll tax liabilities that would have flowed to America’s Medicare program that provides care to over 60 million seniors.

He then referenced a July 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal in which a Tax Policy Center analyst observed claimed: “there’s no reason for these [earnings] to be in an S-Corp — none, other than to save on self-employment tax.”

Breitbart News previously reported “on much of the income Joe and Jill Biden generated through the corporations they established to pay themselves—CelticCapri and Giacoppa are the names of the two so-called S-Corporations—they did not have to pay payroll taxes collected to fund Social Security and Medicare.”

Speaking to Fox News, Banks said “House Democrats used their oversight power to subpoena Trump for his tax returns, but they’ve completely ignored Joe Biden’s abuse of our tax code,” promising changes next year.

“When we take back the House in 2022,” Banks said, “Oversight [Committee] Republicans won’t forget about Biden’s legally dubious tax avoidance schemes.”

Banks said the issue shows that “Democrat hypocrisy is limitless” and their widely-publicized rhetoric on closing tax loopholes might not apply to everyone. “The ACA imposed higher taxes on millions of Americans, but not Joe Biden. He paid $121,000 less in ObamaCare taxes thanks to an obscure tax loophole. Talk about inside baseball,” Banks told the outlet.

“Joe Biden advocated for expanding Medicare, and is pushing to close tax loopholes and for a $3 trillion tax hike,” Banks continued. “At the same time, ‘Amtrak Joe’ made $13 million through speaking fees in just three years, then skimped over $500,000 from Medicare recipients through tax loopholes.”

In his letter, Banks closed with a pointed question for the president: “Do you intend to undo your hypocrisy and pay these taxes back to the American people?”

 

 

There’s some ‘serious regret’ over the election of Joe Biden




THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY

American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now. TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH

 

With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “own the United States.” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “organized crime family.”

LLOYD BILLIONGSLEY

IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/

 

RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs


America's Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy.



The Pandora Papers: How the world of offshore finance is still flourishing | Four Corners


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kPLpZN3I3A


'Pandora Papers' expose how world leaders and the ultra-rich move their money



LISTEN TO THIS WHITE HOUSE BULLSHIT THAT FAILS TO MENTION THE VAST FORTUNE JOE BIDEN HAS SALTED AWAY IN TRUSTS AND OTHER DEVICES ALL THROUGH PARASITE LAWYER SON HUNTER BIDEN'S DIRTY DEALS!!!


White House Reacts To Pandora Papers Exposing Secret Dealings Of Billionaires And World Leaders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjZawZCli-E


HOW MANY MUSLIM DICTATORS HAVE WE BANKROLLED 

AND FOR HOW LONG?

THESE FUCKERS WOULD STAB US IN THE BACK IN A NANO SECOND GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY

DO A SEARCH FOR GEORGE W BUSH'S PAYMASTERS, 

THE SAUDI INVADERS 9/11

THIS FUCKING DICTATOR OWNS $100 MILLION IN U.S. REAL ESTATE INCLUDING A $33 MILLION DOLLAR MALIBU MANSION


Pandora Papers Reveal Details Of Offshore Wealth Storage By World Leaders

The Jordanian Royal Palace responded to the report on Monday by stating there was nothing “unusual or improper” about King Abdullah’s real estate purchases, which it said were made with his own money, not funds from the government treasury......HeHeHe.... there is NO gov treasury except the money looted from the American people!!!

An early reaction from observers such as Oxfam International, a prominent charity organization, was that so many world leaders are busy making extravagant purchases and hiding vast troves of personal wealth while their countries are wrestling with underfunded social services or receiving international aid.


 

Putin's Palace


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2P154dMR_c


Navalny reveals investigation into ‘Putin's Palace’ | DW News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8J2dW-QYQY


Putin's palace. History of world's largest bribe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI

 

Inside Putin's Secret $1 Billion Mansion

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alusg5KG714&list=WL&index=8

‘Pandora Papers’ Expose Secret Investments and Luxury Purchases of World Leaders

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 24: King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein of Jordan speaks at the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly on September 24, 2019 in New York City. World leaders are gathered for the 74th session of the UN amid a warning by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his …
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
1:07

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the group behind the “Panama Papers” leak of financial data five years ago, released a sequel of sorts on Sunday. Dubbed the “Pandora Papers,” the new trove of leaked confidential financial documents suggests dozens of world leaders and hundreds of public officials are stashing large sums of money in hidden bank accounts and secret investment projects.

The Pandora Papers leak includes almost 12 million documents, weighing in at 2.94 terabytes of data, harvested through undisclosed methods from 14 financial services providers. Most of the information was dated between 1996 and 2020, although some older records dating back to the 1970s were included as well.

ICIJ noted that by contrast, the Panama Papers came from a single provider, the Mossack Fonseca law firm, and was only about half as big as the Pandora trove. Some of the same corporate entities exposed in the Panama Papers leak also appear in the Pandora Papers, some of them using new identities or registrations.

The documents “cover a wide range of matters,” from establishing shell companies and trusts to buying luxury goods and planning estates. ICIJ claimed some of the documents are “tied to financial crimes, including money laundering.”

ICIJ said over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries participated in analyzing the leaked documents, making it the largest journalistic collaboration in history. 

The papers name over 330 politicians, plus “celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.” 

The authors said smaller individuals and entities exposed by the leak, including “small business owners, doctors and other, usually affluent, individuals  away from the public spotlight,” were excised from the report to preserve their confidentiality because they “don’t represent a public interest.”

“ICIJ matched Forbes’s billionaires lists against the Pandora Papers to find more than 130 who had entities in secrecy jurisdictions. More than 100 of them had a combined fortune valued at more than $600 billion in 2021,” the report said.

International media organizations reporting on the Pandora Papers leak, such as Reuters on Monday, noted they could not “independently verify the reports or the documents detailed by the consortium.”

“The use of off-shore companies is not illegal or by itself evidence of wrongdoing, but news organizations in the consortium said such transactions could be used to hide wealth from tax collectors and other authorities,” Reuters observed.

One of the marquee names appearing in the initial Pandora Papers leak is King Abdullah of Jordan. The papers showed the king spending some $106 million to buy luxury homes on the Pacific Coast of the United States.

The Jordanian Royal Palace responded to the report on Monday by stating there was nothing “unusual or improper” about King Abdullah’s real estate purchases, which it said were made with his own money, not funds from the government treasury.

“These properties are not publicized out of security and privacy concerns, and not out of secrecy or an attempt to hide them, as these reports have claimed,” the Royal Palace stated.

“Many Jordanians were quick to defend the king, calling the accusations defamation of the monarch. Others derided him over reports that he spent more than $100 million on properties through offshore companies at a time when aid was flowing into his country,” observed the Washington Post, which participated in the Pandora project.

Jordanian nerves may also be a little raw after the unusual palace drama of April 2021, when the king’s half-brother, Crown Prince Hamza bin Hussein, was accused of conspiring with “foreign parties” to destabilize the government. Some of Hamza’s complaints against the monarchy involved corruption.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Crown Prince Hussein (R) arrive for the opening session of the fourth ordinary parliamentary session in the capital Amman on November 10, 2019. (Photo by KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP via Getty Images)

Another notable name was Uhuru Kenyatta, the president of Kenya. According to the Pandora Papers, Kenyatta’s family has half a billion dollars tucked away in offshore foundations, shell companies, and tax havens, administered by Swiss bankers. 

Kenya's President, Uhuru Kenyatta gives an address on November 27, 2019, during the launch of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report in Nairobi, that was attended by opposition leader and former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga and Deputy President, William Ruto, that ushers a national discussion on the future of Kenya and widely speculated to shape the Kenyatta succession and the 2022 politics. - The initiative is at the heart of the reconciliation of Kenyatta and Odinga, former bitter political rivals during the 2017 elections that left the east African nation submerged in post-poll chaos following a controversial electioneering process and outcome, and proposes a redistribution of power and national resources. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP) (Photo by TONY KARUMBA/AFP via Getty Images)

Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta gives an address on November 27, 2019, during the launch of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report in Nairobi. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA/AFP via Getty Images)

Kenyatta billed himself as an anti-corruption crusader during his 2013 presidential election campaign, and as ICIJ sourly noted, he used his last State of the Nation address to “acknowledge that too many Kenyans live in poverty and too many officials loot the country’s public resources.”

The BBC quoted Kenyatta claiming in 2018 that all of his family’s holdings were “open to the public” and duly declared to the proper Kenyan regulatory authorities. According to the BBC, Kenyatta is currently traveling abroad on state business, and plans to “respond comprehensively” to the Pandora Papers when he returns.

The report accused a number of individuals linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin of concealing their wealth, at the lower end including a woman named Svetlana Krivonogikh who acquired an apartment in Monaco through a Caribbean company in 2003. The Pandora Papers strongly implied Krivonogikh was Putin’s mistress and the child born shortly after the purchase of the apartment was Putin’s daughter.

The Kremlin dismissed all of the ICIJ’s implications and allegations on Monday, describing the information as unverified and demanding more concrete evidence of wrongdoing before any action could be taken.

“For now it is just not clear what this information is and what it is about. If there are serious publications that are based on something concrete and refer to something specific, then we will read them with interest,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

“Honestly speaking, we didn’t see any hidden wealth of Putin’s inner circle in there,” Peskov added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club via video conference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020. Putin has rejected the accusations of the Kremlin's involvement in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, saying that he personally allowed his foe to be flown to Germany for treatment. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club via video conference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

On the other hand, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan “welcomed” the revelations and vowed on Monday to investigate all of the dubious financial arrangements exposed by the Pandora Papers and take action if illegal activity was confirmed. 

Over 700 Pakistanis were named in the leaked documents, including finance minister Shaukat Tarin, whose family apparently owns four offshore companies, and water minister Chaudhry Moonis Elahi, who allegedly “pulled out of making planned investments through offshore tax havens after he was warned the investment would be reported to the country’s tax authorities.”

Prime Minister Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic was accused in the report of using shell companies to buy a $22 million chateau near Cannes, France in 2009. 

Czech police immediately stated they would take the allegations seriously and fully investigate “all citizens of the Czech Republic who are mentioned” in the papers. 

Babis, in turn, claimed the document dump was a scurrilous effort to “influence the Czech election,” which will be held this week, and insisted he has done nothing “illegal or wrong.”

“I paid all the taxes. This is completely absurd. The money was sent from a Czech bank; it was my money, it was taxed, and then it came back to a Czech bank,” Babis complained in a TV interview on Sunday.

The UK Guardian noted Babis already faces a “mounting list of controversies” going into the election, including allegations of fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars in European Union funds to construct a hotel. These scandals were serious enough to make the EU threaten to suspend subsidy payments to the Czech Republic.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie appear in the Pandora Papers, having allegedly used an offshore company to avoid paying about $425,000 in taxes on an expensive London townhouse in 2017. The Blairs rejected the allegations on Monday and insisted they have “never used offshore schemes either to hide transactions or avoid tax.”

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 11: Tony Blair attends the Annual Charity Day hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald, BGC and GFI at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 11, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Cantor Fitzgerald)

NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 11: Tony Blair attends the Annual Charity Day hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald, BGC and GFI at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 11, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Cantor Fitzgerald)

The ICIJ criticized financial providers for turning blind eyes to suspicious transactions from powerful politicians and billionaires – including U.S. companies that did business with foreign nationals exposed in the Pandora leak, although none of the purportedly corrupt politicians and oligarchs exposed by the leak were themselves Americans.

An early reaction from observers such as Oxfam International, a prominent charity organization, was that so many world leaders are busy making extravagant purchases and hiding vast troves of personal wealth while their countries are wrestling with underfunded social services or receiving international aid.

“This is where our missing hospitals are. This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-COVID recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look,” Oxfam complained.

“Tax havens cost governments around the world $427 billion each year. That is the equivalent of a nurse’s yearly salary every second of every hour, every day. Ordinary taxpayers have to pick up the pieces. Developing countries are being hardest hit, proportionately. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals that use tax havens are outcompeting those who don’t. Tax havens also help crime and corruption to flourish,” Oxfam said.

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the US, with a net worth of $201bn.

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