Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
POTUS Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission is tearing itself apart in a fight about zionism.
The leading dissident, Carrie Prejean Boller, the 2009 Miss California USA is a right-wing Catholic who picked a fight with zionists at a meeting of the Commission.
Here’s how NBC describes the dust-up:
A member of the federal Religious Liberty Commission has been ousted after a hearing this week that featured tense exchanges on the definition of antisemitism. The ousted member, Carrie Prejean Boller, had defended prominent commentator Candace Owens, who routinely shares antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Prejean Boller, a model turned conservative activist, denied that Owens had ever said anything antisemitic, quoted a Bible verse that attributed the death of Jesus to Jews and pushed back on the idea that some people mask antisemitism in their criticism of Israel.
“No member of the commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, chair of the commission, in a statement Wednesday. “This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America. This was my decision.”
Boller fired back on X.com that Patrick could not fire her, only Trump could.
Patrick’s tweet got over 4.4 million views and Boller’s reply 2.3 million views. This is the mainstream of 21st Century American political discourse.
Boller spoke to Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic:
“It is not a biblical mandate that I have to worship Israel,” Carrie Prejean Boller told me today. The former Miss California USA turned social-media influencer was dismissed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission yesterday after drawing charges of anti-Semitism. But, she wanted to make clear, she regrets nothing—and has no intention of disappearing without a fight.
On Tuesday, the Religious Liberty Commission held its fifth hearing, in Washington, D.C., to discuss anti-Jewish prejudice. Meetings of blue-ribbon panels are typically sleepy, stage-managed affairs designed to serve the purposes of whatever administration put them together. But Boller had other ideas. She repeatedly interrogated the participants about their opinions on anti-Zionism, which she distinguished from anti-Semitism, and complained that other panelists had called Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, the wildly popular podcasters, anti-Semitic.
Video of Boller’s interjections went viral, sparking furious recriminations on the right. “I’m with her,” declared former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Boller took to social media in her own defense and began resharing others’ support for her conduct, including Owens’s claim that the two women were being assailed for refusing to “support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.” Boller’s performance raised her profile—her previously marginal X account increased its following 20-fold. “Be a good Goyim and give me a follow,” she posted Tuesday afternoon, inaccurately using the plural form of the colloquial Hebrew word for “non-Jew.” Yesterday, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, the chair of the Religious Liberty Commission, announced that Boller had been removed, saying in a statement that “no member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue.”
Trump influencer Laura Loomer chimed in (600K views) to claim that the White House ordered Boller’s removal from the Commission:
NEW:
I can confirm that the White House directed @DanPatrick to remove @CarriePrejean1 from the White House Religious Liberty Commission.
Dan Patrick was asked by the White House to remove her.
So no, @CarriePrejean1, you are wrong. Dan Patrick does have the authority to… https://t.co/YlX9z6NlGw
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) February 11, 2026
For those not following this administration closely, here’s some background on Loomer and her role in Trump 2.0 (“chief loyalty enforcer”) from PBS last summer:
Laura Loomer has successfully lobbied to remove aides from several key government roles, including the National Security Council. Despite her close alliance with the president, she’s drawn some foes within the Republican Party, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Laura Loomer: “I’m not working for President Trump. I’m not getting paid by President Trump. I’m not in the Trump White House. I wasn’t even on the Trump campaign. And yet I feel like every single day it’s a full-time job just to make sure the president is protected and that he’s receiving the information that he needs to receive.”
The open war over zionism on the right side of the political spectrum is a dramatic contrast to the more subdued conflict between Democratic party voters (who overwhelmingly oppose Israel) and their elected officials (who overwhelmingly support Israel).
In my long post about silver prices, I talked about a reversion to the mean. This is something that frequently happens in life: something overshoots the norm and then it swings back and overshoots the abnormal. Slowly but surely it finally settles smack in the middle of the bell curve, to use a shit metaphor.
This is what we’re seeing in silver right now. For 150 years silver has underpinned a great deal of US monetary decisions. Then, for the last 50 years the United States fostered and protected a rentiers silver market by turning a blind eye to manipulations in the paper markets at the Comex and simultaneously creating a rentier situation for the distributors of silver buillon in the country. If I went into detail how that happened this post would never end. Needless to say it was a very cozy arrangement that is unraveling every day and it’s something that has the large silver distributors very, very worried.
I’ll give you the short version: the US mint prints the coins, proofs, bars, etc. It then sells that silver to about five large national distributors for a little bit under the spot price of silver. Then those large distributors turn around and mark up the silver bulliion by about 25% and charge huge premiums for every coin, bar, proof, etc., Cozy! Like I said, and like all good rent markets it produces no value. N0w, sometimes this has been done to keep silver in a stable range for industrial purposes, but after the US wholesale deindustrialized beginning with Clinton but turbocharging under Bush–to fund our illegal wars–the justitication fell apart.
While we sold off all our capital stock to China, its demand for silver became unslakable. As I noted in a previous post one gigabyte hour of power from solar panels requires 1,000,000 ounces of silver and that’s just for solar panels. Silver goes into so many more things than we can possibly imagine. Pick someting electronic in your house; its got silver in it. Silver is the single most important industrial metal in the world because it is the most conductive and oxidizes less than only one other metal: gold.
But I’ve digressed from my argument.
For at least 150 years, starting with the opium wars, the balance of trade from East to west was very much skewed to the west: let’s call it what it was: economic pillage masquerading as lifting up all our little brown sisters and brothers. All of the wealth in the east, and that includes India, was over the course of 350 years, siphoned west. That’s economic fact, although people don’t teach economic history, which is a shame. They should.
I say all of this because the Comex has literally become a casino. For example, the total number of registered bars, registered meaning it’s in the vaults and it’s there for delivery has fallen under 100,000,000 ounces it’s now 98,000,000 ounces.
To make matters worse, there are 65,000 contracts of open interest on silver futures at the Comex right now, due in two weeks, that if optioned require the delivery of 325,000,000 ounces of physical silver. Where is that kind of silver going to come from? Pawn shops? Coin dealers? GTFO! Comex is in the grips of a slow, existential crisis, that it’s going to lose.
If those contracts are exercised at the end of February, because they’re March contracts, there is absolutely no telling what kind of chaos the US financial system might endure. Why do I say the entire financial system? The dreaded ‘D’ word.
Remember mortgage backed securities, CDOs, CDO2, synthetic CDOs etc. . .
There are similar derivatives in the silver market, but they exist in a black box, undisclosed so nobody really knows how much the open interest or notional value really is or who owns the risk—although the prevailing guess is about $1trillion USD notional. If the Comex implodes the cascade effects might well resemble what happened to those two Bear Stearns Hedge Funds in the summer of 2007 that set off the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Even if the Comex manages to extend contracts out a few more months, the physical supply of silver does not exist. I repeat there is no physical supply anywhere that can meet this year‘s demand for silver. Only two places comes close to the silver necessary for global demand: one is already fully allocated in the Canadian vaults in Ottawa in Toronto and that silver is not going to be let go of. The other is silver owned by retail investors. But as I have said before: silverbugs aren’t going to sell for $95, not $120, not $175. Not going to happen.
So in two weeks time, it looks like the Comex is going to implode.
How about over in the East? What’s China doing?
Chinese market regulators are actually doing their job. Here’s how, as I am quoting Dario at this link:
“What the Shanghai future exchange just did and what they did yesterday is effectively saying that starting from the last month of February that (it’s not a coincidence is the same day when the settlement for March 2026 futures contracts and the Comex begins starting) from that day any participant in the exchange that is not purchasing contracts for [physical] hedging purposes and even if purchased for hedging purposes they haven’t been allocated [a] physical delivery quota all their quota for silver in the front end contract is going to be brought down to zero.
So what the Shanghai future exchange here is saying is like okay game is over. We have to restrict the physical silver that we have left here for settlement for those that need it from an industrial perspective. So for hedging purposes and we need to keep the real purpose of the exchange going otherwise if things continue in this way we can effectively shut for business and that is going to be a huge mayhem not only across China but across Asia.
What’s China doing? Well, those communist bureaucrats that oversee the Shanghai Futures Exchange are doing something remarkable: they are working as hard as they can to preserve the sanctity of a free and fairly functioning market dedicated to true price discovery. Listen to the full podcast. You’ll listen in disbelief. The Chinese are better free-marketeers than the corrupt managers of the SEC. I’m dead serious. Chinese regulators make our SEC look like a collection of jackasses at a rodeo-clown show.
So, here is how this plays out: if Comex implodes—which is probable—but Shanghai muddles through, which given its bottom of the barrel minimum silver reserves is going to be extremely hard to pull off, but not impossible, massive amounts of wealth will accelerate their repatriation into the mainland. For over a thousand years silver formed the basis of Chinese monetary policy. They know what they are doing.
And the West? The West will reap what it sowed for near on 500 years. Our wealth is soon to be a multi-century river filling the current account surplus of the East.
Just watch.
I stand second to few in my admiration for how well China has done. But the super boosters are super tiresome. If China had been a small nation, the best they would have done is parallel Japan: do very well, then the US breaks your legs. Reminds me of Americans in 1950 or 95.
They remind me of many Americans in 1950 or 1995. “We are at the top because we are the best. Our governance is superior, our culture is superior. It’s just because we’re better than you all, and we always will be.”
I doubt the CPC’s leadership is this stupid or arrogant (yet). They remember China getting its face pushed in for over a hundred years.
China is at the start of a good run. Leaving aside climate change and ecological collapse it’ll last 100 to 150 years, EXACTLY the same as the American run. China’s current rise is just a hegemonic replacement cycle story. Not even as impressive as Britain creating the industrial revolution. This is just taking the lead, China has done NOTHING revolutionary yet. This is a dirt standard hegemonic replacement cycle. Happens every 150 years or so.
(The American run began in the 1880s, when they overtook Britain in industrial production.)
The reason China succeeded when other nations didn’t comes down to three things: competence, the prior hegemon’s help and size. All three were required The Japanese were super competent after WWII, absolutely amazing. When they started to challenge the US, they were forced into the humiliating Plaza Accords. If China was the size and population of Japan, the same thing would have happened to them, no matter how “superior” their culture or leadership is. India failed despite its size because the government and leadership were (and are) terrible.
This also makes Chinese booster sneering at smaller nations the US has beaten down tiresome. It’s not the same situation. “Oh, they’re incompetent.” No, idiot, Cuba is an Island nation with 9.75 million people and no resources to speak of which has been under sanctions for every year of its existence since it through the Americans out. That they even still exist is amazing. Venezuela had 28 million and is close, Iran (though it is larger and further away and thus had a far better hand to play) has likewise been under sanctions since day one, and the Iraq/Iran war was sponsored by America.
China has done great. No regular reader of mine can think I don’t admire the hell out of China’s leadership and people (and I like Chinese culture and Chinese people and have all my life, I was practically raised by Chinese for my first five years.)
But stop with the glazing and remember that hubris is always punished.
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This “issue” has flaired up again as Trump attacks Canada again.
The short answer is that in the short term Canada is moderately dependent on the US and the long term it is hardly dependent on America at all.
Right now we (Canada) have a lot of trade with the US. We buy mostly finished goods, and pay fees to American tech and copyright holders. The US buys oil (which it cannot easily substitute away from in the short term). The US buys cars from us (#2, but deceptive, since they’re made by US companies in Canada), a small amount of machinery like nuclear power equipment, and a grab bag of other industrial goods. We also sell Potash (about 80% of what the US needs) and aluminum to the US, for which there is no easy substitute: these things are in global shortage, and the best alternative for potash is Russia and despite various bullshit about American/Russian alliances, Russia doesn’t trust the US at all and would not be a reliable trade partner. Without potash American farmers are screwed, since it’s used for fertilizer. America can’t significantly improve domestic potash production, there isn’t enough in America.
There’s substantially nothing we buy from the US that we can’t get from China for less or Europe for a bit more. And what the US sells Canada is high value add goods, not resources. We’re a valuable customer.
And, at the brass tacks level, if all trade stopped tomorrow, Canada could feed itself and would have plenty of energy. Our houses would stay hot in the winter and cool in the summer, our trucks would have gasoline and diesel, our trains would run and our planes would fly.
Canadian dependence on America is about 80 to 90% a legacy issue. We currently do a lot of trade with America, but we don’t have to. We can sell manufactured goods to Europe, and resources to China and buy from China and Europe and various other nations. Nothing we get from the US is a “must have with no feasible replacement.”
So the game is very much along the lines of the old joke about saying nice things to a barking dog while you find a rock. Not that we will ever fight the US unless they invade, but we just need time to disentangle our economies and move to reliable trade partners.
America could hurt us a lot if they cut of trade, but it wouldn’t be a mortal blow and we would recover. We’d prefer to do it slow, but if we have to do it on an emergency basis it can be done.
Canada doesn’t need the US. It just needs some time to change trade partners, and that’s what Carney is doing, because as he has said, it no longer makes sense to do business with the US.
We’ll talk a bit more about trade with the US from a global perspective soon, but basically the US has a legacy trade position: no one needs to buy from it any more unless they’re stupid (Europe refusing to buy Russian gas). Selling to it is still necessary for many nations, but that will become less true over time.
America’s prosperity and power are both legacies, they have no solid foundation to stand on any more. Ironically Canada is in a better position in the middle to long term than America simply because it only has 40 million people and is a continent sized country with a continent’s worth or resources. The only significant danger is an American invasion.
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So, as you probably know America is stopping all fuel from reaching Cuba. They’ll be out in days. Tomorrow the jet fuel runs out, so no more international flights.
But the real issue is that no fuel means no diesel tractors, no distribution of food, not enough refridgeration: in a word, famine.
This is deliberate US policy. Mexico has a sent a couple of ships full of food with a military escort, but that’s irrelevant: without fuel the food will not get where it needs to go and cannot be preserved. She doesn’t have the guts to send oil, which is understandable.
This is the problem with the fall of the USSR. No one these days has the balls, desire and ability to stand up to the US when it pulls shit like this. Russia’s busy and a lot weaker than it used to be, plus they’re basically just off-brand capitalists now, China doesn’t care and doesn’t have a navy with enough projection power yet, and the EU are spineless (that may be changing somewhat, but not fast enough.) Everyone else is too weak and too scared.
An international convoy system, with each convoy guarded by military ships from multiple countries might work, but I see no sign anyone is even talking about it, let alone organizing.
So Cubans will starve if Trump keeps this up and Cuba doesn’t capitulate and let America choose its government.
This is a direct result of Trump getting away with his naval blockade on Venezuela: in that case not letting them send oil out. No one did anything to stop America or to even impose a cost, so on to Cuba.
China could simply cut off all access to some key manufactured goods like magnets or any of hundreds of other goods where they’re the only supplier, including goods that the US has to have to make weapons. But this doesn’t really matter to them, so they aren’t. Or a coalition of other countries could all sanction the US at the same time, but again, no.
Perhaps your question is “why should they?”
I’m glad you asked, imaginary but helpful reader.
Because Trump started with Venezuela, then went to Cuba. Who will he go to next? There are four strategies for dealing with bullies:
- Join them and beat up their victims. (We’ll call this the NATO strategy.) If you help them, and kiss their ass enough, maybe they won’t attack you. Works surprisingly well, until it doesn’t. Ask Denmark about that. Or Canada. Or, well, the EU as a whole.
- Fight back. If you’re too weak, get together with your friends. Even if you lose, make them hurt. And you might win (Vietnam says “Hi! America still cringes every time they hear our name!”)
- Scurry like rats into corners and hope they don’t pick you as their next victim.
- Ignore them if you’re as strong or stronger than them. Bullies only attack those weaker than them. You aren’t. Who cares who they beat up as long as it isn’t you?
Most of the world is picking #3: “scurry like rats!” China isn’t, they’re picking #4 “Who cares if they beat someone else up, they can’t do it to us!”
There’s a lot to be said for #4, as long as you’re sure you’ll never be weaker than the bully (a safe bet for China right now) and don’t give a damn about anybody but yourself.
But #3, “scurry like rats, hoping you aren’t the next victim” is stupid. Each successful victimization just whets the bully’s appetite and the more cowardice he sees, the more he pushes people around. Victims multiply.
Don’t want America, under Trump or another President to revisit the Greenland situation with an amphibious assault one fine morning?
Send those convoys to Cuba or find some other way to hurt America in general and Trump in specific. Not because you care about Cubans or, heck, human welfare. Gaza has revealed you don’t give a shit. But because you’re protecting yourself by protecting others, setting the precedent that the powerful can’t just pick you off one by one.
But that would require statesmen with guts, wouldn’t it?
Ain’t none of them in the EU with any power.
So I guess the Cubans will starve, just like the Palestinians, in a 100% manmade famine which the US either caused (Cuba) or which couldn’t have happened without American assistance (Palestine.)
Remember, the Athenians in the Melian dialogue were right “The powerful do what they will, the weak suffer what they must” but so were the Melians when they pointed out that with every atrocity the Athenians were alienating others, and that they, too, would suffer.
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by Tony Wikrent
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Fintan O’Toole, February 26, 2026 issue [The New York Review]
Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence….
Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. Habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.
First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, the regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied….
This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.
They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax….
How Germany Went from Street Protest to Silence
Sharon Kyle, Jan 30, 2026 [LA Progressive]
The Step‑by‑Step Collapse of Moral Resistance. In 1930, Germans still filled the streets. By 1938, open opposition had vanished.
Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency
Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber, Feb. 2, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via Letters from an American]
…A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.
The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint…..A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a November letter that the whistleblower’s lawyer addressed to Gabbard. The letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, accused Gabbard’s office of hindering the dissemination of the complaint to lawmakers by failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so….
Spencer Ackerman, 05 Feb 2026 [FOREVER WARS]
…Wyden is a longstanding member of the Senate intelligence committee. He takes seriously its responsibilities to stop the intelligence agencies from using their operational secrecy to break the law, violate peoples’ privacy – or worse – and enmesh the country in dangerous misadventures both foreign and domestic….Interviewing Wyden is a maddening mixture of candor and obstinacy. He has a security clearance to lawfully access classified information. The reporter interviewing him does not. He wants to tell you what he found, but that would break the law and get him, at a minimum, thrown off the committee. You as the reporter are trying to absorb what little Wyden is telling you. You are primarily attentive to the vastness of what he leaves unsaid. You try to improvise clever ways to ask, and reask, questions that might clarify what he means, and/or yield leads for other ways to investigate it. Usually Wyden says he can’t answer those, either….All I can tell you is that Wyden’s record of warning that there is deep and constitutionally-serious dirt being done by the intelligence agencies in secret is unblemished. Never once in the many years I have been reporting on Wyden have I ever encountered a warning of his to be hyperbolic, let alone baseless….
Phil Stewart, Erin Banco and Jonathan Landa, February 4, 2026 [Reuters, via Letters from an American, Feb 6, 2026]
A team working for President Donald Trump’s spy chief, Tulsi Gabbard, last spring led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines, said Gabbard’s office and three sources familiar with the previously unreported events.The sources said the goal was to work with the FBI to investigate claims that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, but added the probe did not produce any clear evidence of Venezuelan interference in the U.S. territory’s elections.
Hunter Walker, 02.06.26 [Talking Points Memo]
On Jan. 6, 2026, a group of election conspiracy theorists released a report detailing allegations that the 2020 presidential results in Georgia’s Fulton County were “falsely padded” with questionable ballots. A little over three weeks later, FBI agents raided the county’s offices and seized 700 boxes of voting records….The “Fulton County Report of Investigation of the 2020 General Election” was billed as coming from the “Election Oversight Group” and dated Jan. 6, 2026. EOG is a supposed watchdog group that has repeatedly filed complaints against election officials in Georgia and produced research documents based on thoroughly debunked allegations. Some of the group’s past work was cited by Trump and his attorneys in 2024 as he defended himself against Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and pressed his ultimately successful case for presidential immunity. There are indications this more recent EOG report also made its way to Trump’s team and even that it may have influenced the mysterious investigation that led to the Fulton County raid.
Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon
[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
BREAKING: DOJ Empowers Board of Immigration Appeals to Strip Due Process From Migrants
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
The Paramilitary ICE and CBP Units at the Center of Minnesota’s Killings
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Ken Klippenstein, Feb 04, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Gregory Bovino reported to Corey Lewandowski, not CBP chief
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Wait! The public face of nationwide immigration enforcement, Gregory Bovino, said in a newly discovered email that his boss wasn’t the head of CBP. He reported to Corey Lewandowski instead.
Emails reveal possible command structure for immigration Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago
Mark Rivera and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones, February 4, 2026 [abc7chicago.com WLS]
Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said his boss was not the head of CBP, emails newly obtained by ABC News show.
Accountability for ICE and CBP
Garrett Graff, February 01, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.
I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.
It was the first time I’ve ever sat down and tried to organize and explain all of the last twenty-five years of DHS and immigration enforcement since 9/11 and painted a complete picture of what’s gone wrong with ICE and CBP. Overall, the totality of the criminality inside CBP in particular is so much worse than I even realized….
ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans
Biplob Kumar Das, February 5 2026 [The Intercept]
Some of the largest banks in the nation for years have eschewed the business of private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two firms that operate more than half the private carceral facilities in the country, including many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.
The moves to “debank” the companies, which have been dogged by reports of rights abuses, came after the banks’ reviews of their environmental, social, and governance policies, which included site visits and meeting with civil rights leaders. According to a nonprofit report, the moves by banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, cost the prison companies billions in potential financing.
This 3-page court opinion releasing Liam Ramos is one of the best ever written!
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 02, 2026
Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon
John Woodrow Cox, February 3, 2026 [Washington Post]
In October, a retiree emailed a DHS attorney to urge mercy for an asylum seeker. Then DHS subpoenaed his Google account and sent investigators to his home….
“Unconscionable,” Jon thought as he found an email address online for the lead prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, who was named in the story. Peering through metal-rimmed glasses, Jon opened Gmail on his computer monitor.“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” he wrote. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”That was it. In five minutes, Jon said, he finished the note, signed his first and last name, pressed send and hoped his plea would make a difference.Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone.“Google,” the message read, “has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”Listed below was the type of legal process: “subpoena.” And below that, the authority: “Department of Homeland Security.”That’s how it began. Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be….
Yet Another Sign that the Trump Administration is Laying the Groundwork for Election Intervention?
Bob Bauer, Feb 05, 2026 [Executive Functions]
For many years, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, the Department of Justice has published a manual for its prosecutors entitled the Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses. It is now in an eighth edition, published in December 2017. It is a remarkable document—and it articulates principles of federal prosecution that the president is currently rejecting….
The department has pulled the 2017 manual from the website of its Election Crimes Branch. With the midterm elections only months away, journalists and responsible members of Congress should press the White House and the Department of Justice to explain why….
Stephen Prager, February 06, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Bannon floats big lie to prepare stealing of 2026 elections
Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 05, 2026 [Letters from an American, February 4, 2026]
Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.
Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.
Judge Incredulous as Trump Lawyer Asks Him to Create New Law for Mark Kelly Retribution Crusade
Kate Riga, 02.03.26 [Talking Points Memo]
“You’re asking me to do something that the Supreme Court has never done — that’s a bit of a stretch, is it not?” the George W. Bush-appointed judge asked DOJ’s John Bailey.
The Trump administration tried during the hearing to argue that the diminished speech rights that apply to the active duty military — meant to preserve obedience and discipline — should apply to Kelly, who is retired, as well.
Strategic Political Economy
Pay No Attention To The Pillaging Behind The Curtain
David Sirota, February 03, 2026 [The Lever]
Have you noticed that the “news” is now almost 100 percent anything other than the unprecedented financial pillaging of the entire country, at every single minute of every single day? Have you noticed how life is becoming unaffordable for almost everyone around you, and yet this is barely a topic of national conversation, buried under the spectacle of violence and political theater being manufactured by the party-media complex?
- This is no accident — it’s part of an ongoing effort by both parties and their media machines to help their donors depoliticize the systematic looting of America. They are trying to make politics, voting, and elections about literally everything but the Great Fleecing. Why?
Blinders on. Because they do not want the public to believe that elections can change the economic superstructure that enriches the oligarchs and corporations. They do not want the political conversation to be about how nobody can financially survive, because if the political conversation is about that, then the general population might develop expectations. Expectations that democracy is an actual system rather than a slogan. Expectations that voting can create actual mandates. Expectations that elections result in politicians getting into power and materially improving people’s lives — or facing the prospect of being quickly thrown out of office….
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism — Macroeconomics is the driver, not median voters.
Thomas Ferguson, February 3, 2026 [Boston Review]
…The Democratic Party’s historic links to working-class Americans had been fraying for a while, but Jimmy Carter’s decision to replace G. William Miller with Paul Volcker—well before the nineties—transformed a slow downward spiral into a catastrophe. Stanley Kelley’s dissection of how Volcker wrecked Carter’s reelection effort in his important 1983 book Interpreting Elections was a fine start. It should have been aggressively followed up by studies of how the Great Volcker Deflation destroyed the Democratic brand as the heartland collapsed over the next few years. The fact that a Democrat appointed him is rarely pondered by political scientists.
Together with colleagues like William Greider and Joel Rogers, I have worked through the dismal details (including opinion polling), so I will simply dismiss the idea that any appeal to the median voter was responsible for any of this. Carter’s decision reflected massive pressure from financiers and financial markets in a panic over what in hindsight was a trivial uptick in the government deficit. Ever since Democratic financiers and business groups lined up behind fiscal austerity, their demands have defined the party’s center of gravity.
This was certainly the case in 1984. Almost everyone agrees that Walter Mondale’s promise to raise taxes doomed his bid for the presidency. But as Rogers and I document in Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, Mondale made that decision after two key Democratic financiers, Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, flew out to Minnesota and pressed him to drink from the poisoned chalice.
The story four years later was similar, if less melodramatic. Under pressure from the party’s financial bloc, Michael Dukakis resisted calls for stronger fiscal spending that might have helped workers whose jobs were disappearing amid the first great surge of imports and overseas investments by U.S. firms. He lost in a landslide. Two of the most prominent Democratic financiers supporting his campaign were, once again, Rubin and Altman, while Larry Summers, closely connected to Rubin, advised the campaign. Thereafter the Democratic elite’s emphasis on austerity, lower taxes, financial deregulation, and the benefits flowing from free trade, unrestricted overseas investment, and a high dollar has barely shifted. Their indifference to investing much in average Americans, reconstructing heartland communities, or coping with falling rates of unionization reflects a policy fixation rivaling that of an Egyptian dynasty. Its devastating long-run effects on the party’s position in the Midwest and South are only now being widely recognized.
So much, then, for median voters. This is how money-driven politics works….
Right now, Democratic congressional leaders clearly think that Trump is so vulnerable that a repetition of 2025’s across-the-board shift to Democrats is likely in the upcoming midterm elections. They talk far more boldly than they act while reveling in crypto cash and other streams of political money. But they and many others have a long history of underestimating Trump’s economics and its appeals, as well as how swiftly and convincingly he is able to dramatize those doctrines as populist and outflank Democrats on the left. With Trump’s ostentatious overtures first to Zohran Mamdani and now to Elizabeth Warren, so reminiscent of how he used to talk up Sanders, the shape of things to come is obvious. As the administration revs up cascading streams of tax rebates, prescription drug price cuts, and other (short-term) goodies for an electorate that considers the Democrats more corrupt than the Republicans, these calculations on the part of Democratic elites can easily prove as misguided as they were in 2016 and 2024….
Jaysus on a popsicle, Mary and all the Saints do I have some egg on my face. Since January 27 silver has been on one seriously wicked ride. I’ve been banging my head to Metallica’s Whiplash for the last ten days.
So, WTF happened?
In short: from where I sit the paper markets are trying to create a force majeure situaiton for March contracts. The market is incredibly volatile and highly illiquid. Traders are draining the vaults of bullion. Indeed, as Dario notes, “Silver physical deliveries at the Comex just crossed 4,000 contracts (~20m/oz)and we are only 6 days into February.” That’s nucking futs.
If the Comex defaults to force majeure (SHFE is a bit of a different matter) the Comex will lose all credibility as a fair functioning market dedicated to price true discovery. Never mind that silver prices in the USA has been a cozy Fed-supplied rentiers market for decades, should this happen businesses will begin a mad scramble to source silver for themselves. That leads to supply and demand chaos. Bad. Vewwy bad.
On the SHFE–Shanghai–one day last week over 1.3 billion ounces of silver volume were traded. That’s one year of global demand in a day. The Chinese government’s motto regarding traders shorting silver on the SHFE seems to be FAFO. The Chinese are cracking down hard. Why? Well, to produce one gigawatt of power using solar panels requires 1 million ounces of silver.
You read that right. One million ounces.
Fundamentals matter. Global demand is strong. Businesses need silver for industrial applications beyond just solar panels and dentistry. But traders can keel-haul fundamentals sometimes with epically shitty consquences. Watch this video by Dario starting at minute 6:43 for how this possibly plays out.
It’s ugly. And it seems to me that maintaining a viable silver market is now fully in the hands of the Chinese. US traders are determined to destroy price discovery and reinstate the cozy rentiers market in the US.
I have no idea how this will end.