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Venezuela Opens Oil Sector as Washington Tightens Grip
Posted by Joshua Scher Venezuela’s National Assembly has approved a sweeping overhaul of the country’s hydrocarbon law, dramatically rolling back state control over the oil industry while the Trump administration simultaneously moved to loosen selected sanctions on Caracas. The reform, fast-tracked through the legislature and signed into law by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, dismantles key […]
Trump’s Pick for Fed Chair Pops Up in Latest Epstein Files
Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, appeared in the government’s Friday release of additional Jeffrey Epstein tiles.Warsh’s name appears to be on an emailed list of guests to “St. Barth’s Christmas 2010,” among others such as Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and disgraced director Brett Ratner. Warsh also appears on a list of people attending a dinner hosted by British aristocrat William Astor. The news comes the same day that Trump picked Warsh for the Fed, an unexpectedly conventional pick considering how desperate Trump is to sharply lower interest rates. Warsh has a history of being cautious on inflation, but has signaled a willingness for lower rates in the past few months. Warsh has always been involved in monetary policy, having been appointed to the Fed in 2006. But his inclusion in the Epstein files is actually not surprising, considering that his wife is billionaire heiress Jane Lauder, granddaughter of Estée Lauder and daughter of Republican donor Ronald Lauder. That puts him in the same wealthy circles that Epstein himself operated in.Still, it’s unfortunate that this would happen on the same day that he was picked for the Fed. Before Friday’s release, Warsh’s biggest controversy was his connection to Ronald Lauder, who reportedly inspired Trump’s interest in Greenland during his first term in office. Lauder has purchased commercial interests on the island.Now Warsh may have to answer questions about how well he knows Epstein and what he was doing on St. Barts during Christmas 2010. Questions will also be raised as to whether Trump chose him because he, Epstein, and Warsh know each other from being in the same circles.
Trump’s New Trade War Isn’t About Trade — It’s About Regime Power
Posted by Joshua Scheer Donald Trump is taking his economic threats international. Fresh off Davos, Trump launched an unprecedented attack on Canada, threatening to impose a 50% tariff on all Canadian aircraft sold in the U.S. and decertifying every new plane made in Canada, including Bombardier jets, until Gulfstream — a “Great American Company” — […]
In the AI age, 'slow and steady' doesn't really win
Every tech company is being judged on the delicate dance between industry transformation and business preservation as AI accelerates.
Scale AI CEO: 'Near infinite demand' for AI that works
Scale AI CEO Jason Droege recently sat down with Semafor Tech Editor Reed Albergotti to talk about how companies are leveraging AI to drive growth and stay competitive.
Is Kevin Warsh Really the Fed Chair of Trump’s Dreams?
President Donald Trump, who is an inflation dove, announced Friday morning that he will name Kevin Warsh—whose past record is that of an inflation hawk—to succeed Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been so desperate to lower interest rates that last year he contemplated firing Powell, whose views on monetary policy are fairly mainstream. Now he’s nominating somebody who, unless he’s undergone a complete ideological transformation, will displease Trump even more.In the past, Warsh has been such an inflation hawk that when he was a Federal Reserve governor in April 2009, he pronounced himself “more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks.” This was at a time when the consumer price index, or CPI, was negative 0.4 percent, unemployment was 8.9 percent, and the economy was in a recession that turned out to be the longest and deepest downturn since the Great Depression. During the decade that followed, inflation never rose above 3.2 percent, and mostly stayed below 2 percent.Today, inflation is 2.7 percent, which doesn’t worry me particularly. But that’s 0.3 points higher than it stood in the last CPI report, released before Trump won the 2024 election by claiming inflation was “the worst we’ve ever had.” (Trump turned inflation hawk temporarily so he could bash President Joe Biden.) There’s every reason to believe that Trump’s tariffs (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t strike them down) will push inflation higher. The Warsh of April 2009 would be apoplectic about that.But the Warsh of January 2026 is unconcerned—or at least he’s been saying he’s unconcerned in order to secure the Fed nomination. In a November Wall Street Journal op-ed, Warsh suggested inflation wasn’t a worry right now because “AI will be a significant disinflationary force, increasing productivity and bolstering American competitiveness.” Whatever. The Fed, Warsh wrote, “should abandon the dogma that inflation is caused when the economy grows too much and workers get paid too much.” If that made Warsh sound like a left-winger, he reaffirmed in his next sentence that he was not. “Inflation,” Warsh wrote, “is caused when government spends too much and prints too much.” That sounded like the old inflation-hawk Warsh, but he was careful not to blame Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill, which will increase the budget deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade. Instead, Warsh blamed quantitative easing—i.e., the Fed’s purchase of government bonds and other financial instruments to stimulate the economy after the Great Recession—even though the Fed had been unloading those assets (“quantitative tightening”) for the previous three years. The Fed stopped in December, but that was after Warsh published his op-ed.Warsh’s Journal piece also faulted the Fed for excessive bank regulation, which he said “systematically disadvantaged small and medium-size banks, which has slowed the flow of credit to the real economy.” Here’s a reality check: The string of bank failures in 2023 (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank) was the result of under-regulation, not overregulation, including a partial rollback of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that occurred during Trump’s first term.Warsh used to oppose “the rising tide of economic protectionism,” and, as recently as 2018, he told Politico that “I wouldn’t prioritize a [U.S.-China] trade deficit as the framework by which we should judge the importance and the difficulty of the most important great power relationship for the next 100 years.” That’s heresy in MAGA-world. But today, Warsh is not only OK with Trump’s tariffs, he faults the Fed for criticizing them because it’s an admission that “their credibility has been impaired.” These more up-to-date diagnoses (along with his more explicit calls for lower interest rates and his preposterous claim that the reconciliation bill was “putting the fiscal house in order”) apparently appeased Trump sufficiently for him to choose Warsh, bypassing the other, more reliably sycophantic Kevin in Trump’s White House. But if Trump believes Warsh is going to lower interest rates faster than Powell, the markets do not; news that Warsh was Trump’s pick sent the dollar higher and gold lower. They can’t both be right.Don’t discount Warsh’s good looks. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Trump’s post was otherwise a dull recital of Warsh’s résumé, suggesting that maybe there was no “everything else.” If there were, it might be that Trump enjoys forcing ambitious people to renounce their prior views. I’m convinced that he chose JD Vance (who has turned out to be a maladroit vice president) not in spite of Vance’s previously calling Trump “an idiot” and “America’s Hitler” but because of it; it demonstrated that he’d made Vance grovel.An alternative explanation, though, is that Trump is doing this for the billionaires, who are displeased with his antics around the Fed. Billionaires don’t like inflation or regulation, and they trust only so far others who aren’t billionaires. Warsh would be the Fed’s first billionaire Fed chair. He has achieved that status not through his own efforts but through his wife, Jane Lauder, the daughter of Ronald and granddaughter of Estée. According to Forbes, she’s worth $2.7 billion, which means as long as they’re married Kevin is worth that much too. Jay Powell’s net worth is a not-inconsiderable $20 to $55 million, but Warsh would be easily the richest Fed chair in history. That he became so through a family connection conceivably increases Trump’s sympathy for him (since Trump did too).If you’re inclined to believe, as I do, that billionaires’ opinions about how to manage the economy are (with rare exceptions) formulated by their money rather than their brains, then Wall Street is right about Warsh’s likely direction and Trump is wrong. It took Trump about a year to go from choosing Powell, in 2017, to turning against him. Lately he’s been trying to throw Powell in jail. I believe we’ll witness a similar trajectory with Warsh. Asked to choose between his president and his wealth, he’ll choose his wealth, because that’s what billionaires do. Score one for the American oligarchy.
The Craziest Part About Trump’s Massive IRS Lawsuit
Donald Trump has sued the IRS and the Treasury Department after an agency contractor leaked his tax returns, revealing that he hadn’t paid income tax for a decade—but his lawsuit isn’t likely to stand up to scrutiny.In court documents filed late Thursday, Trump demanded that the agencies cough up a minimum of $10 billion in damages that would be paid out on the taxpayer’s dime. But there are several issues with the suit itself that raise questions about whether the case can be litigated at all.First, Trump, in a personal capacity, is suing the IRS and the Treasury for a breach that occurred between May 2019 and September 2020. The problem: The breach occurred during the first Trump administration, when Trump himself was in charge of governing those institutions.Further still, the bulk of the 27-page complaint appears to have passed the statute of limitations. As Ed Whelan, the former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, noted online, the first claim in Trump’s complaint must be brought “within two years after the date of discovery” by the offended party.“Trump knew of the leaks back in 2020. The complaint feebly tries to get around this problem by contending that Trump and his fellow plaintiffs ‘were not able to bring an action against an unknowable, indeterminate defendant to vindicate their rights’ until they were notified of criminal charges against Littlejohn,” Whelan wrote, referring to Charles Littlejohn, the accused contractor.Littlejohn is currently serving five years in prison for the breach, which he pleaded guilty to in 2023.“But Littlejohn isn’t the defendant. Treasury and IRS are,” Whelan observed. “And Trump knew back in 2020 that they had allowed the allegedly unlawful leaks. So that claim is time-barred.”Trump is suing the government in conjunction with his two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as the Trump Organization.“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” the lawsuit states. The second claim listed in the lawsuit, which relates to the privacy clause, similarly expired, according to Whelan. “Seems to me that it wasn’t long ago that conservatives decried vexatious litigants and those who tried to fleece American taxpayers,” Whelan snarked.
Why We Already Know Year Two of Trump 2.0 Will Be Worse Than the First
It was already a pretty weird week, what with Tulsi Gabbard—the official in charge of gathering foreign intelligence—showing up at a Georgia election office for an FBI raid. But then, on Thursday, the president of the United States filed a lawsuit that is an obvious shakedown of the government he runs. Donald Trump, his two older sons, and their business are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion for allowing a government contractor to gain access to their tax filings (the contractor later leaked the files to the press). It reads like a transparent attempt to steal a few billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he can get away with it.It’s an interesting twist of fate that the Gabbard raid and this lawsuit both dropped in the same week, because they actually go together quite well in the Venn diagram of Trumpian iniquity. Both developments prove a core point about our system that everybody had better learn and be prepared to act on after Trump leaves office (assuming that happy day comes): namely, that Trump has shown that a conscienceless and corrupt person can pollute the system in endless ways because previous generations never anticipated that someone this comprehensively conscienceless and corrupt could win high office. There simply aren’t laws that prohibit much of what he does because it never occurred to anyone that a holder of high public trust would ever even try such stuff.Let’s look first at this IRS suit, beginning with a little historical background. First of all, as The New York Times reported when it got the leaked documents, Trump paid no federal taxes in 10 of 15 years from 2004 to 2019. We don’t know that that was a crime; maybe it was just fancy accountants. But one way or the other, it sure isn’t right.But OK, they got leaked. That’s against the law. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they had to be leaked was that Trump refused to release his tax returns publicly, making him the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon not to do so. Had he complied with that honorable custom—one that requires that people adhere not to a law but to a democratic norm of behavior—there would have been no leak.But fine. They were leaked. That’s illegal. And guess what? The guy who did it is in prison! He started serving a five-year sentence in May 2024. We can debate whether, in breaking that law, Charles Littlejohn in fact performed a public service (historical fact of note: Nixon’s returns also were leaked, and for that crime, no one was ever indicted). But Littlejohn broke a law, and he was convicted. The system, on paper, worked.For normal human beings, that would have been enough. Justice was served. But not for the Trumps. The slightest whiff of an opportunity to scam someone or someones—in this case, the taxpayers he was elected to serve—gets them salivating like hyenas over a springbok carcass. So now we have the unprecedented and frankly insane circumstance of the sitting president of the United States suing the government of the United States, over which he himself presides, trying to use his office to line his pockets. They’ll pick that carcass to the bone if they can.Now you might ask: Shouldn’t there be some kind of law preventing the president of the United States from suing the federal government, at least while he’s in office? I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some such law from 1856 or whatever, and someone will discover it. But assuming there’s not, I can tell you why there’s not: It never occurred to people that a president could be so petty and venal as to do something like this! Now let us turn to Gabbard. She has been sidelined for some time, ever since she made the error, fatal in Trumpworld, of saying something true to the factual record—that U.S. intelligence services saw no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said at the time, “I think they were very close to having one.” More recently, she was frozen out of the action on Venezuela.So, needing a way to get back in Dear Leader’s good graces, she boned up on a topic that she knew would demonstrate her value: the “fraudulent” 2020 election. How can she possibly claim jurisdiction over this obviously domestic matter, many have been asking since this week’s raid? Well, she can’t, on real Earth. But on Trump Earth, you might recall that back in 2020, there were some wild conspiracy theories that involved foreign governments and intelligence agencies. Remember “Italygate”? I thought you might not. It never really gained traction among us flat-earthers. But it was a QAnon favorite for a while there, and it held that an Italian aerospace company and an Italian Army general worked with the American Embassy in Rome to use Italian satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Yes, that is what they believed. Then there’s the China angle, which Trump was touting on social media just the other day. In case the Italygate story isn’t ominous enough for you, Trump tossed China into the mix. “China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” he posted. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.” This is the stuff of mad dogs and March hares, to put it mildly. But if you’re Tulsi Gabbard, it’s ample reason to claim that a conspiracy this immense not only allows for the nation’s chief intelligence officer to be involved, it veritably demands it!So now we are about to launch—at the expense of the same taxpayers whose pockets la famiglia Trumpa is trying to pick in the IRS suit—into an investigation into “crimes” that are more than five years old (and thus likely beyond the statute of limitations) and were never committed anyway. But Trump wants people to go to jail, and Gabbard and Pam Bondi—who meanwhile is 41 days late delivering the Epstein files and thus in clear violation of federal law—will move heaven and earth to make sure someone does. (Note: Bondi released more than 3 million Epstein-related documents today, just a couple hours after I wrote this.)Again, we might ask: Why is there no law preventing a president from using his government to pursue such obviously baseless revenge lawsuits? Because no one imagined a president would behave so sleazily. Or they thought that, if one did, surely Congress, regardless of party loyalty, would step up and assert its constitutional authority and make an unequivocal statement about what is right and wrong in a democratic society. Yeah. Right.So this is where we stand, as we begin this second year of the second Trump presidency. Three more years of this. It’s getting harder and harder to see how we survive it, but if we do, Congress is going to have to pass a bunch of laws that were never thought necessary until we elected a gangster as president.
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Zeteo •
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