Tag Archives: Zerohedge

Dealing With America’s Health Crisis

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There is a health crisis in America. It has taken many forms. How many people do you know in your life that take less than two pills a day (other than vitamins)? Compare the beach-goers of today with those of the 1960’s–admittedly in the 60’s they were covered in more material, but there was a whole lot less fat. Did the entire country stop exercising or eating right? What happened? A number of well-informed people believe the increase in obesity is due to things being added to our food that weren’t there 60 years ago.

On Tuesday, Zero Hedge posted an article about the health crisis in America and some plans to make us all healthier.

The article reports:

After more than four decades in public health, Redfield believes the former president “chose the right man [RFK Jr.] for the job” to combat the processed foods industrial complex, which has ignited an obesity crisis across the Heartland. 

“For instance, obesity in American children has increased dramatically since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, from around 4 percent in the 1960s to almost 20 percent in 2024,” he said, adding, “The causes of childhood obesity are complex, but a primary origin is clearly the modern American diet of highly processed foods.” 

He explained the causes for this obesity crisis are primarily due to “special interest and corporate influences on our federal agencies.” 

Redfield pointed out that “Kennedy is right” about the corporate capture problem of federal agencies.

Kennedy is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies. NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma. And as the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I know the agency can be influenced by special interest groups.

Redfield acknowledges that agency capture is a serious issue, highlighting that federal agencies responsible for regulating food and medicine are possibly compromised by the food industrial complex and big pharma. 

Maybe it was a warning sign when big pharma and the feds pushed Ozempic as the ‘wonder shot’ to end the obesity crisis instead of promoting exercise and safe, clean food.

Voting for President Trump could improve your health!

The Problem Of Illegal Immigrant Gangs Is Spreading

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On Friday, Zero Hedge posted an article about a problem a Texas oil company is having with Venezuelan gangs who are in America illegally.

The article reports:

It’s only going to get worse from here, as the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open border policies have now come to a ‘neighborhood near you’ (for some of you). In the past week, we saw armed Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua members terrorize the northern Denver suburb of Aurora and other sanctuary cities run by far-left Democrats. New concerns out Thursday afternoon indicate critical infrastructure is now under threat from migrant cartel members. 

According to Libs of TikTok, a Texas-based oil/gas company issued a memo to employees informing them that police and the FBI have warned armed Cuba and Venezuela migrant gangs are committing thefts in the Permian Basin (America’s highest producing oil field). 

Here’s the memo:

Industry peers and law enforcement in West Texas (WTX) are aware of a recent increase in organized criminal activity inclusive of violent crimes, gang activity and oil field thefts in and around WTX operational areas. Specifically, regional law enforcement and the FBI advised that gang members emanating from Cuba and Venezuela are organizing and working in concert to commit thefts within the Permian Basin. These individuals and groups are armed, violent in nature and will not hesitate to use force.

Crimes associated with these groups include the theft of oil, diesel fuel, copper wire, and catalyst elements. Recent incidents have also included two assaults by water haulers who were attempting to steal oil from WTX oilfield sites. After the thieves were observed by witnesses who drove up to investigate, the thieves attempted to use their vehicles to run the witnesses off the road. In another incident, a thief, acting as a spotter and following a water hauler who had stolen oil, also attempted to run a witness off the road. There have been numerous reports of second vehicles acting as spotters for water haulers committing oil thefts.

This is what happens when you have no southern border.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Has Specific Issues He Wants To Target

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is an interesting addition to the Trump team. I am sure there are places where the two seriously disagree, but I suspect there are also places where they strongly agree. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has said for years that he distrusts the pharmaceutical companies who push vaccines and that is concerned about the chemicals being put into our food supply. While I don’t agree with all of his ideas on either subject, he does have some good ideas.

On Saturday, Zero Hedge posted an article about one of the good ideas.

The article reports:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent decades as an environmental lawyer fighting polluters and supported ‘green’ organizations for environmental justice. He is now setting his crosshairs on the pharmaceutical industry and cleaning up the nation’s food supply chain of ultra-processed foods and seed oils that poison consumers. He has determined that suspending his presidential campaign to team up with former President Trump will be necessary for the strongest success rate in making Americans healthier again, not through big pharma’s Ozempic shots but instead revitalizing small farms and shaking up corrupted federal agencies.

Lifelong liberals like RFK Jr. backing Trump is one of the strongest indicators of just how extreme the ticket, unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats have become. Harris’ team recently announced their first proposed economic policy, which was rooted in communism and included disastrous price controls. It appears the far-left ticket is being advised and heavily influenced by Marxists. 

The article concludes:

Mega corporations, some of which are part of the ‘green’ cult, want greater and greater control over the nation’s food supply chain. Some are even pushing insect-based diets.

The big takeaway from RFK Jr.’s support of Trump is that he believes the correct path to restoring America’s health is not Ozempic shots but revitalizing the nation’s local food supply chains by making small farms great again. He wants to reset the food supply chain system and purge it of ultra-processed foods and seed oils that are killing consumers. He also proposed shaking up federal agencies in health and food that have close ties with ultra-processed food companies. 

For years, we have told readers that it’s critical to support local farmers and put the food supply chain back into the hands of the people—not corrupt mega-corps that flood store shelves with cancer-causing junk food.

Henry Kissinger famously said, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

It’s time for Americans to regain control of the nation’s food supply chains by making small farms great again. Also, boycotting the processed food industry and buying local food is critical.

If Trump wins, RFK Jr. will likely provide tailwinds for small farmers. And Europe will take note as corp/gov’ts have also waged war on small farms. 

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. This would be very good for all Americans.

Things To Think About Before You Vote

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On Friday, Zero Hedge posted an article about some things that the Biden administration will not be talking about during the presidential campaign.

These are the facts:

1. It takes the typical U.S. household $1,069 more a month just to purchase the same goods and services that it did three years ago.

2. Two-thirds of the respondents to one recent survey indicated that they had to take action to deal with rising financial stress within the past year.  Those actions included “cutting back on spending, skipping monthly bills, or taking an additional job”.

3. Home insurance rates have risen by 38 percent since 2019.

4. Home rental prices are up 30 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House.

5. A whopping 61 percent of U.S. renters cannot afford the rent on a median-priced apartment in the United States right now.

6. Gasoline prices are up 46 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House.

7. The average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage is up 148 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House.

8. According to Zillow, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical home in this country has almost doubled during the past four years.

9. One recent poll discovered that 44 percent of retired Americans are considering going back to work because the cost of living has become so oppressive.

10. New home sales fell 11.3 percent last month.

11. Pending home sales are dropping at the fastest rate ever recorded.

12. According to the House Budget Committee, there have been more than 8 million migrant encounters nationwide while Joe Biden has been in the White House.  We truly are in the midst of an immigration crisis that is far greater than anything that we have ever witnessed before.

13. Thanks to our unprecedented immigration crisis, the homeless population in the city of Chicago actually tripled in just one year.

14. Murder rates are up by double digit percentages in many major U.S. cities this year.

15. Continuing jobless claims just shot up to the highest level in almost three years.

16. The number of job openings in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in more than 3 years.

17. Rite Aid just announced that it will be closing 27 more stores.  That is on top of more than 500 stores that it has already decided to shut down.

18. Walgreens plans to close approximately one-fourth of its 8,600 U.S. stores.  If the economy really was “booming”, why would they be doing this?

19. Today, 20 percent of the entire population of the state of California is living in poverty.

20. According to one recent survey, 46 percent of Americans don’t even have 500 dollars saved up.

21. So far, the U.S. has spent a total of approximately 175 billion dollars on the war in Ukraine, and the Russians are still winning.

Hopefully, President Trump will mention some of this during his campaigning.

Sometimes Congress’ Priorities Are Amazing

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On Monday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

While Congress failed to pass a border security bill over the weekend amid a flurry of billions in international aid to Ukraine and Israel, they did set aside $3.5 billion for “Migration and Refugee Assistance” for the State Department to “address humanitarian needs of vulnerable populations and communities.”

While written in an absurdly broad brushstroke that’s going to be open to interpretation, X user ‘Oilfield Rando‘ suggests that the funds will be used “to pay the NGOs coordinating the illegal invasion at our southern border, and providing all the freebies once they’re in.”

The article includes the following screenshot from Twitter:

It really is time for a new Congress.

Cooking The Books

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The Biden administration claims that the economy is really doing well. Some of us who buy gasoline or shop at grocery stores might not agree with that statement. The other claim has been that there is a booming job market. Our city is have layoffs in some of our local companies, is yours? There seems to be something fishy here. On March 29th, Zero Hedge posted an article explaining what was fishy. This is one of those articles when I post what I don’t totally understand, so please be patient. I have very little to add–the article says it all.

The article reports:

The first red flags emerged in the summer of 2022: that’s when the Biden Labor Department started well and truly rigging the labor market data.

Regular readers may recall that it was back in July of 2022, when we first warned that something had “snapped” in the labor market: that’s when a striking discrepancy emerged between the number of US Payrolls (as measured by the BLS’ Establishment Survey, a far more crude and imprecise, yet much more market-moving data series), and the number of actual Employed Workers (as measured by the BLS’ far more accurate Household Survey) . As we showed then, after the two series had tracked each other tick for tick for years, a wide gap opened in March 2022 which quickly grew to 1.5 million jobs in just 3 months…

The article includes the following chart:

 

The article further explains:

And while some of this discrepancy could be explained with the record surge in multiple jobholders, which increased by 1 million since March 2022 to an all time high of 8.6 million at the end of 2023 (as a reminder, the Establishment Survey counts 1 worker have 2 or 3 (or more) multiple jobs as, well, 2 or 3 (or more) separate jobs, even if it is just one worker trying to make ends meet under the roaring inflation of Bidenomics), most of the gap remained unexplained.

There was more: it was around the summer of 2022 that the Biden labor department – in its zeal to show job growth no matter the cost, or quality of jobs – also started fooling around with the composition of the labor market, with most of the monthly gains going to part-time workers, even as full-time workers stagnated or declined. The culmination, as we reported earlier this month, is that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Which is great… until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

The article concludes:

Putting it all together, we now know – as the Philly Fed reported first – that the labor market is far weaker than conventionally believed. In fact, no less than 800,000 payrolls are “missing” when one uses the far more accurate Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data rather than the BLS’ woefully inaccurate and politically mandated payrolls “data”, and if one looks back the the monthly gains across most of 2023, one gets not 230K jobs added on average every month but rather 130K.

Of course, none of that paints Bidenomics in a flattering picture, because while one can at least pretend that issuing $1 trillion in debt every 100 days to add 3 million jos per year is somewhat acceptable, learning that that ridiculous amount buys 800,000 jobs less is hardly the endorsement that the White House needs.

Which is also why nobody in the mainstream media – which is now nothing more than the PR smokescreen for the Biden puppetmasters, the government and the deep state – will ever mention this report.

As such, we urge all readers to read Philly Fed analysis (link here) and to analyze the excel data (link here) at their own leisure, because in a fascist state, the media no longer works for the people.

Think of these numbers when you vote in November.

Where The Money Is Actually Going

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On Friday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

President Joe Biden is heaping another $5 billion onto a $136 billion pile of taxpayer-funded student loan debt forgiveness, as one of his signature 2024 (vote buying) schemes heading into the 2024 election.

Not only has moral hazard been reduced to an academic concept, shouldn’t taxpayer funds be used to bail out poverty-stricken Americans before people with college degrees who signed their names to a contract for non-dischargeable debt? We digress.

Around 74,000 student loan borrowers will now see debt canceled as a result of administrative changes enacted by the US Department of Education in the latest round of relief – including borrowers enrolled in the government’s income-driven repayment and public service loan forgiveness programs, Bloomberg reports.

Each program requires at least a decade of payment or service to be eligible for relief. Mismanaged federal student-loan plans have left some borrowers without promised relief after making payments for as long as 25 years. -Bloomberg

“My administration is able to deliver relief to these borrowers – and millions more – because of fixes we made to broken student loan programs that were preventing borrowers from getting relief they were entitled to under the law,” Biden said in a Friday statement written by other people.

Of those receiving taxpayer-funded assistance, roughly 60% are taxpayer-funded “public servants” – so the snake continues to eat its tail. So, buying votes with voters’ money.

Since when is the federal government able to change the details of a contract mid-stream? Since this is essentially an expenditure, why is it coming from the Executive Branch? The House of Representatives is supposed to be in charge of spending. This should quickly be found unconstitutional by the courts, but I seriously doubt anyone will bring the case.

Who Is UNRWA?

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On December 27th, Zero Hedge posted an article about The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) .

The article reports:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was originally a small agency mandated to provide basic humanitarian relief for Palestinians, including a vote for renewal every three years. Seventy-three years and four generations later, and with more than 30,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $1 billion, it has astonishingly become one of the largest UN agencies.

The article notes:

In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, UNRWA has, in fact, long been operating as the de facto government. By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons. If UNRWA were not there, Hamas would have been forced to fill the vacuum and, for example, build hospitals and schools and find solutions to economic hardship, including unemployment and poverty.

As senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said, in explaining why no cement could be spared from terror tunnels to build bomb shelters for Gazan citizens:

“The tunnels were built to protect the fighters of Hamas from [Israeli] airstrikes. As you know, 75% of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees. It is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect the refugees.”

Hamas was effectively saying: We are responsible for what happens underground, while UNRWA is responsible for what happens above ground.

In addition to evolving into a monster-sized agency, UNRWA has also morphed into a very costly incubator for terror. UNRWA-run schools emphasize and promote the “right of return,” a euphemism for flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians and turning it into a Muslim-majority Islamist state backed by Iran.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Is there any doubt that we need to stop supporting the United Nations? American taxpayer dollars are funding terrorism.

Much Needed Legislation

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Being elected to Congress is a wonderful thing–the prestige, the recognition, joining a very select group of people, and seemingly the opportunity to increase your net worth significantly.

The following Tweet by ZeroHedge was tweeted on September 28, 2020:

Wow! An amazing increase in personal wealth that didn’t actually involve inventing or marketing a product! Unfortunately this is not an isolated example.

The article includes a few more examples from Business Insider:

Burr (North Carolina Senator Richard Burr), who endured a months-long federal investigation into his personal stock trades, last week reported making several recent stock sales along with his wife, Brooke Burr.

The Burrs sold up to $165,000 worth of stock in Enterprise Products Partners, a natural-gas and crude-oil pipeline company, between April 28 and April 30. The company’s stock price has remained effectively level since then.

Brooke Burr also reported selling up to $100,000 in MetLife Inc. floating-rate noncumulative preferred stock and up to $100,000 in US Bancorp depository preferred shares.

Burr, who wasn’t charged, made a flurry of stock sales on February 13, 2020, six days after cowriting an opinion article on FoxNews.com that sought to ease public concern over the threat COVID-19 posed to the US.

“Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration,” Burr wrote along with then-Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican.

But on February 27 of last year, Burr — then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — told a more dire story to a small, private luncheon gathering at Washington’s tony Capitol Hill Club.

“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” Burr said, according to a secret recording obtained by NPR’s Tim Mak. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

The Justice Department’s investigation of Burr’s February 2020 stock trades, together valued at more than $1.7 million, centered on whether the senator made his trades based on insider information obtained during senators-only briefings about the COVID-19 threat.

Burr says he is not planning to run for reelection in 2022.

Business Insider also mentions Jim Inhofe:

An aviation enthusiast who announced his 2020 reelection bid by piloting a propeller plane upside down, Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican of Oklahoma, has regularly made news over the years for close-call incidents while flying.

More recently, Inhofe sought to remedy another aircraft situation — this time on paper.

In a May 17 letter to the US Senate Secretary Julie Adams, Inhofe acknowledged understating the value of the assets — most notably, airplanes — held by The Padre Company LLC, a limited-liability company that the senator controls.

As of 2019, Inhofe’s LLC held three aircraft together valued at up to $1 million: a 1979 Grumman Tiger, a 1999 RV-8, and a 1979 Cessna 340. It also included real estate.

Inhofe wrote that his letter provided a “total reconciliation of the life of my assets” within The Padre Company LLC, which formed in 1999.

In short, Inhofe had not been previously factoring in the value of the real-estate property as part of his public disclosure of the LLC. Now he is, which is why the reported value of the LLC has increased.

“Ahead of filing his annual disclosures each year, Senator Inhofe discusses it with the Ethics Committee to maximize transparency and ensure he is adhering to the spirit of the law, not just the letter of it,” the spokesperson Leacy Burke told Insider. “Previously, it had been understood that these were considered personal properties and exempt, unreportable assets. This year, in the interest of greater transparency, he was encouraged to file the amendment and include them, as you can see he did.”

It pays to be in Congress, and an attempt to end the insider trading that seems to be rampant there is coming from a rather unlikely source.

Zero Hedge reports:

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants to end what is effectively legalized insider trading by members of Congress by barring them from trading individual stocks ever again.

Warren first attempted to push through similar legislation with the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act she introduced in 2018 and then again in 2020. Both bills unsurprisingly died in the Senate Finance Committee, which Warren sits on.

The renewed push comes as several members of Congress have come under recent scrutiny for profitable stock trades in recent months, according to Business Insider. The include Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC), Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and former Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia.

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes.

 

When Reality Meets Spin

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Yesterday Zero Hedge posted an article about how the crisis at the southern United States border is impacting New Mexico. Actually it is impacting both the State of New Mexico and the politics of New Mexico.

The article reports:

The radical-leftist governor of New Mexico, who sent National Guard troops packing in February, needs federal help now, it seems. She’s in the Swamp to beg for funding as illegal immigrants overwhelm the state. After months of neglecting the border cities and towns, toeing the DC elite party line of no “crisis” here, and facing a veritable citizens’ revolt in the Land of Enchantment, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is demanding federal government assistance for the dire situation – one she exacerbated through indifference to constituents.

And it comes on the heels of yet another county drawing a line in the sand and refusing any further influx of illegal immigrants seeking asylum. Sierra County, boasting a population 11,116 and a 21% poverty rate, joined Otero and Lincoln counties in passing resolutions opposing the relocation of migrants to their communities.

This isn’t just happening in these three counties, either – it’s an untenable and cruel situation being thrust on an impoverished state by government officials who seem to be mere puppets for the Democratic Party.

According to Deming City Administrator Aaron Sera, in Luna County, buses unload between 300 and 500 immigrants each day. As a town of a 14,183, it has been mercilessly overwhelmed by the governor’s dangerous game of partisan politics. Even larger enclaves, such as Las Cruces, have been overrun with illegal aliens, completely depleting community and local government resources as they’re  forced to house and care for 6,000 asylum seekers – and all in a matter of four short weeks.

The purpose of political asylum is to provide refuge for those people whose lives are in danger in their home countries–either for political, religious, or other reasons. Political asylum does not mean that you can simply enter another country illegally in hopes of either working there or living off of the largess of the people who live there.

America needs to redo its immigration policies. We need to help people in poor countries, but we also need to bring in people who will contribute to America, not take from it. There has to be a balance of those two things if America is to survive. This crisis is the result of Congressional inaction. How many bills have you seen come out of the current House of Representatives that included a common-sense approach to immigration? How many immigration bills in recent years have reflected common sense?

We need to seal the border and enact sane immigration laws. Let’s cut the cost of legal immigration and welcome those who want to help grow America.

Exactly What Is A Soft Coup

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The following video was posted at YouTube on August 21:

The video is 37 minutes long, so in case you don’t want to watch it, here are some of the highlights (courtesy of Zerohedge):

It all started from the fake dossier which led eventually to the appointment of Robert Mueller (Special Prosecutor) and the entire foundation is based on a falsity. . . . I understand the next revocation of security clearance is probably going to be Bruce Ohr because he crafted the fake dossier with Christopher Steele, and he may even have written the thing…

After the FBI supposedly fired Christopher Steele, Bruce Ohr had at least 70 communications (with Steele) back and forth talking about the ‘firewall’ is still there to protect us. Recent accounts show that Bruce Ohr either wrote the dossier with Christopher Steele or he wrote it himself in communication with Christopher Steele.” –Kevin Shipp

…“Yes. Oh, they coordinated it for sure. There are 70 emails back and forth between Ohr and Steele crafting the dossier. So, the FBI and Department of Justice were intimately involved with the creation and publication of that dossier.”

“They even went further than that. The FBI and CIA counter-intelligence even placed an agent inside the Trump campaign.” -Kevin Shipp

…Shipp concluded that a Civil War in the making right now. “I think we are at the beginning of a civil war. You’ve got the ‘Dark Left’ and you’ve got the Conservative people, the Constitutionalists. In progressivism, one of its tenets is to change the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, and uproot traditional America. Whatever happens in November is going to intensify that. . . . Their attack is against Christians and the Constitution.”

Is it possible to drain the swamp?