Tag: news

President Trump says he wants both he and Joe Biden to take drug tests before their first debate on September 29, according to an Oval Office interview with the Washington Examiner.

Trump “expressed suspicion at what he said was a sudden, marked improvement in Biden’s debate performance during the Democratic primary season,” which Trump thinks was due to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, according to the report.

“Nobody thought that he was even going to win,” Trump said of Biden – who participated in 11 debates during the primary season. Trump suggested that there was a big difference in Biden’s performance between the first debates against a crowded Democratic field and the last debate on March 15 against Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“… his debate performances were so bad. Frankly, his best performance was against Bernie. We’re going to call for a drug test, by the way, because his best performance was against Bernie. It wasn’t that he was Winston Churchill, because he wasn’t, but it was a normal, boring debate. You know, nothing amazing happened. And we are going to call for a drug test, because there’s no way — you can’t do that.”

More via the Washington Examiner:

Q: “What do you think was going on?”

“I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be OK against Bernie,” Trump answered. “My point is, if you go back and watch some of those numerous debates, he was so bad. He wasn’t even coherent. And against Bernie, he was. And we’re calling for a drug test.”

Q: “Is this like a prizefight, where beforehand you have a test?”

“Well, it is a prizefight,” Trump answered. “It’s no different from the gladiators, except we have to use our brain and our mouth. And our body — to stand. I want all standing; they want to sit down.”

The president based his call entirely on his own observations, and not on any actual knowledge of Biden’s actions. “All I can tell you is that I’m pretty good at this stuff,” he said. “I look. I watched him in the debates with all of the different people. He was close to incompetent, if not incompetent. And against Bernie he was normal…And I say how does that happen?“

The first Trump-Biden debate, to be held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is little more than a month away. The president gave no indication of when he would make his drug test request, or even to whom. But he appeared to know that there is little chance such a thing would actually happen. “I think it’s appropriate,” Trump said. “I don’t know that they’ll let me do it, but I think that they should do it.”

“Go back and watch his performances in some of those debates,” Trump continued. “He didn’t know where he was. And all of a sudden he was not good, he was normal, and I don’t understand how. I don’t know if there is or not, but somebody said to me he must be on drugs. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m asking for a drug test. Both candidates. Me, too. I take an aspirin a day.”

Meanwhile, Biden supporters have been looking for ways to wriggle out of an in-person debate altogether, while Notre Dame – which withdrew from hosting the first Trump-Biden debate after the St. Joseph County deputy health director recommended against it, and the college cited a “diminished educational value.”

The DoJ is officially considering whether to launch high-profile federal investigations into a handful of mostly Democratic governors who adopted regulations requiring hospitals to return COVID-19 positive patients to nursing homes or other long-term care facilities, a blunder that has been described as perhaps the biggest policy error of the entire US outbreak.

Put another way – the DoJ (which Dems will undoubtedly castigate for ‘bowing to political pressure from the administration’) is trying to prove that Gov Andrew Cuomo really did kill grandma.

How the hell is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo releasing a book in October about his pandemic response when NYC is still shut down & he literally turned nursing homes into grandma death factories?????

— Ashley StClair 🇺🇸 (@stclairashley) August 18, 2020

In a press release published Wednesday afternoon, the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division said it had requested data from New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania – all states with Democratic governors (though PA and MI are considered swing states) – about the timing of their mandatory return policies, and what input went into establishing them.

Cuomo has answered questions about the policy before; he’s claimed that he reversed it as soon as he was made aware of what was happening. But clearly not fast enough to stop the Empire State from reporting the largest death toll in the country, both per capita and in terms of the standalone total.

New York’s death rate by population is the second highest in the country with 1,680 deaths per million people. New Jersey’s death rate by population is 1,733 deaths per million people – the highest in the nation. In contrast, Texas’s death rate by population is 380 deaths per million people; and Texas has just over 11,000 deaths. According to Worldometer, NY reported a total of 32,984 deaths.

The goal is to determine whether there’s enough there to launch an investigation under the “Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act” (CRIPA), which protects the civil rights of residents in state-run nursing homes. Specifically, they need to determine whether orders to mandate returning sick patients to the homes ultimately contributed to the higher rate of mortality.

Of course, even states like Texas, Florida and California, which are large states like New York, didn’t see such pronounced fatalities – or anything close to it. Those states are all in the ballpark of 10k deaths, and they only just reached that level recently.

Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband told the AP that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that nursing home residents are adequately cared for with “dignity and respect”, and that their lives aren’t put at undue risk.

Cuomo hasn’t said anything about Wednesday’s DoJ announcement – he’s been too busy grandstanding about the new CDC guidelines, which he – and a group of other Democratic governors – claimed was part of a plot by Trump to cover up the coronavirus pandemic…or something like that.

NY Gov. Cuomo on new CDC testing guidelines for COVID-19: “Shame on the CDC for allowing the president to politically interfere with public health, and that’s another lesson we have to learn here.”https://t.co/idLbvidzrh

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 26, 2020

It’s not like New York and these other states ever cared about federal guidelines before? Why should they start now?

Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity6.com,

Central banks are killing our currency to protect the already-rich…

In our recent article It’s Time To Position For The Endgame, Chris Martenson explained how the US Federal Reserve and its sister central banks around the world have been engaged in the largest and most egregious wealth transfer in all of history — one that has been drastically exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic.

The official response, tremendous monetary stimulus by the central banks paired with massive fiscal stimulus from national legislatures, has been pitched as “saving the system”.

Yet, in reality, it has merely served to accelerate the transfer of capital from the public into the pockets of the already-rich.

Anyone with eyes can see how the central banks have abandoned all pretense of monetary fiduciary responsibility and have simply cranked their printing presses up to “maximum”:

In concert with this surge of liquidity, national legislatures have added their own emergency measures. In the US alone, the CARES Act pushed nearly $3 trillion in fiscal stimulus into the system, and will highly likely soon be followed by another $1-3 trillion depending on which party’s bill gets passed.

Despite these staggering sums, the amount of money trickling into the average US household has been meager and is drying up.

Instead, these $trillions are mostly finding their way into the coffers and share prices of corporations. We have seen the fastest and most extreme V-shaped recovery in the history of the financial markets since the March swoon. The major indices are now back to record all-time-highs, despite the major carnage covid-19 has wreaked on the global economy.

So who benefits from that? Oh yeah, the people who own those companies. The already-rich.

Remember: 84% of all stocks are owned by the top 10% of households.

So in a nutshell, the official response from our “leaders” in government to the pandemic threat has been: Rescue the markets at all costs!

Chris refers to this as the Leave No Billionaire Behind (LIBB) Program. As he describes:

Between March-April 2020, the Fed added a staggering $282 billion to the bottom-line wealth of US billionaires:

But that wasn’t enough.

So the Fed kept printing. And buying, buying, and buying more and more financial assets held – of course – mainly by the already-wealthy.

By May 2020 the total added became $434 billion, making all the US billionaires more billionaire-y:

But even that wasn’t enough for the Fed.  So it printed even more, increasing the total to $583 billion by June:

Yep, you guessed it. It didn’t stop there. By July, the grand total was up to $637 billion:

Considering that US GDP dropped by -32.9% (annual rate) and clocked in at an annual rate of $19,408 billion in the second quarter of 2020, the US Federal Reserve had granted an astonishing (truly!) 3.3% of the entire output of the entire country to US billionaires.  For doing absolutely nothing.

Yes, people have many reasons to be angry and to protest these days. But they ought to be furious with the Federal Reserve and its lackeys in Congress who have utterly and completely failed to check these egregious, unfair, and socially destructive policies that grossly reward the elite at the expense of the bottom 99%.

Let’s do a little math here. Handing 3.3% of the value of the entire economic output of 160,000,000 working people to roughly 600 individuals is the equivalent of granting each one of those 600 billionaires the entire yearly output of 9,020 people.

It’s like the Fed decided that each billionaire deserved to have 9,020 people become their slaves for the year.  How is that *not* psychopathic?  How is that fair?  What’s the plan here? Keep going until these 600 people own everything in the world?

And where’s the media on this? They happily parrot every statement the Fed makes, without asking even the slightest of critical questions. They are failing us badly, too.

Okay, so why should you care?

Because what the Federal Reserve is doing generates enormous systemic risks which could well destroy the economy and much of our future prosperity.

At heart, I am a conservative in the sense that I’d like to keep (i.e. “conserve”) what we’ve got, both ecologically and economically. I’d vastly prefer that we change our nation’s destructive path now on our own terms than being forced to on reality’s terms later on. As painful as the former may be, the latter will be much more so.

History is complete on the matter: one cannot print one’s way to prosperity.  It’s been tried over and over again and my view is that if it could be done, we’d all be speaking Latin because the Roman Empire with it brilliant engineers would have figured it out millennia ago and would never have collapsed.

If the Romans couldn’t work it out, it simply can’t be done.  Mathematically, it also doesn’t pencil out.  Money is a social agreement, a contract.  It’s not real wealth.  Taking the attempt to the extreme, what would happen if everybody had a billion dollars and nobody had to work?

So printing currency only manages to delay and exacerbate the inevitable by building up the energy for its own destruction.

And the longer the delay, the worse the reckoning when it ultimately arrives.

So to recap, the Fed et al have ensured that the covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a boom for the elites, while the rest of us are experiencing an economic Depression that could last for years:

So, with the central banks hell-bent on supporting the rich by sending the prices of all financial assets farther into the stratosphere, is high/runaway inflation the natural next stage from here?

Will those worrying about a systemic “crash” from all the intervention and deformation be proved wrong?

We addressed these questions earlier this month for Peak Prosperity’s premium subscribers in Chris report Is High Inflation Now A Bigger Danger Than A Deflationary Crash?

Every so often, we’re encouraged by our paying subscribers to share an important report with the general public. This is one of those times.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can read the report in full, for free, by clicking here. (free registration required)

Update (1650ET): CNN is reporting that all games have been boycotted tonight…

BREAKING:
CNN has learned that all of tonight’s NBA games have been postponed.

— Coy Wire (@CoyWire) August 26, 2020

*  *  *

It appears boycotting entire games is the new “taking a knee”.

At least, that’s what breaking news out of the NBA is making it out to look like. Those who were ready for an afternoon of playoff basketball and were getting set to tune into this afternoon’s Milwaukee Bucks vs. Orlando Magic game 5 are going to be sorely disappointed.

Why? The Milwaukee Bucks are reportedly refusing to play.

Story: The Orlando Magic showed up for their NBA playoff game. The Milwaukee Bucks didn’t, days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin. A history-making boycott is underway in the Bubble. @PostSports https://t.co/bd0eGQFKd5 pic.twitter.com/f6zS4kHwrh

— Ben Golliver (@BenGolliver) August 26, 2020

The team “never took the floor before the start of Game 5 against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday” according to NBA.com. The same report says that “players across the league have been adamant that more needs to be done to effect social change after the recent police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.”

The Orlando Magic followed suit, returning to their locker room since there was nobody to compete against. 

No Milwaukee Bucks or Orlando Magic players took the court for the start of Game 5. pic.twitter.com/5MYZ85MjWP

— NBA on TNT (@NBAonTNT) August 26, 2020

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN a has said the Bucks have decided to boycott the entire game.

This should go over great with the league’s fans and the advertisers who have signed up for spots during the game today. Then the question becomes – if players chose to simply not play – what are the leagues and teams paying them for?

How long before people in other professions decide to simply walk out on their jobs in the name of “justice”?

Magic players walking off the court after the Bucks boycott Game 5

(via @NBAonTNT)pic.twitter.com/zPcb7NUUbw

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) August 26, 2020