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twenty twenty five. For months, they pushed back against having to testify, arguing the process was politically motivated, that the subpoenas were quote unquote invalid and legally unenforceable, and that to any relevant information they had could be delivered via assigned statement. In January twenty twenty six, Chairman James Comer advanced two resolutions recommending the Clintons be held in contempt

of Congress for refusing to comply. Days before a vote to hold them in contempt, the Clintons finally agreed to testify in February.

who was a software developer. Waite brought Glaine to Hillary's Daughters of Chelsea's wedding as a plus one guest in twenty and ten, and Hillary says she was unaware of any criminal activity relating to Glayne Maxwell, specifically before her crimes republicly revealed a few years ago. Hillary was asked to recount the origin of the Clintown Foundation, which Hillary only joined the board of in twenty thirteen because she

was busy serving in office. Hillary was asked about Glene Maxwell leading a breakout session on ocean conservation at a Clinton Global Initiative conference in twenty thirteen. He said that she was not involved in this selection process for those sessions, but that Glen Maxwell had been an internationally recognized ocean advocate around that time. Hillary refused to answer a question about whether her husband is a quote unquote smart guy, which.

any of Epstein's crimes were publicly revealed. Representative of Pat Fallon with the Republican Majority talked about how Jeffrey Epstein visited the White House seventeen times under the Clinton administration, this is mostly for White House Historical Association events and donated money to the White House Historical Association, but said that Epstein never visited under Trump or donated money to Trump.

This could, in fact just be simply because the Trump admin You know, Trump came into office after Trump's relationship with Epstein fell through and Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.

About an hour in Nancy Mace asked Hillary Clinton if she believes the Epstein files are quote unquote a vast right wing conspiracy.

how did you miss it? If he's I believe, one of the most prolific sex traffickers in the world, you were Secretary of State, how did you miss it?

Right first to a part in Hillary's opening statement about how Rubio's shrunk a specific office to combat international sex trafficking, and she isn't quite able to like to understand how Hillary is critiquing that while also saying that the Justice Department mishandled the Epstein investigation while she was Secretary of State. It's this interesting just break in not really understanding how

the government works. And this clip also shows like how sharp Hillary is being able to follow this line of questioning better than her own lawyers in some instances be able to actually like respond to what Mace is really asking.

be open to the public. Ultimately they were not, but they were recorded on camera and transcribed for later release. Part of the terms for this private hearing this deposition was that press and photographers were not allowed inside the room, and that deposition materials would only be released in full through official channels after sensitive information like staffer names president, the deposition and off the record exchanges between lawyers were

properly removed or redacted. At about an hour and twenty minutes into Hillary's deposition, the Clinton staff learned that one of the Republican Committee members leaked a photo of Hillary to right wing influencer Benny Johnson Crazy, who posted the picture and wrote, quote breaking the first image of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath about Jeffrey Epstein to the Republican Oversight Committee. This is the first time Hillary has had

to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy. Photo provided by Representative Lauren Bobert.

committee to try to get to the bottom. If they are incompetent and they are incapable of complying with the law that the Congress passed, we need to know that because they are falling down on the job. They have an FBI director is more interested in drinking beer in a hockey dressing room after our team won the Olympics rather than being responsive and complying with the law as

it has been promulgated. So I don't think it's unfair to say that given the sequencing of the events, starting with the way that President Trump made the release of the files a key element of his twenty twenty four campaign, the promise that he and then his attorney general made that the files would be released, then a walking back of that as they began to look at the files, an ignoring of what they had promised, including that they had a client list on the desk of the attorney general.

Reasonable people would have to assume they are engaged in a massive cover up, which is infuriating as an American, as a citizen, all of us should be, regardless of party, wondering what are they hiding?

and that Hillary's trying to garner sympathy. Things get very heated over over the course these like three minutes, as they like argue about, you know, if she's actually answering the question. Mace talks about being a survivor herself and how she's trying to, you know, get the truth out of these hearings. Hillary responds by talking about how she's been very sympathetic to Mace's situation and respects the work that she's doing in the Epstein hearings, but is trying

to answer the question specifically about Lutnik. It's a pretty loud and contentious three minutes. About two minutes after that, Republicans made Hillary read emails from the Epstein files.

own entertainment. Yes, it's disgusting. Yes, I have a few clips here. This is about three clips about her intellectual kind of ruthlessness and the ways that the questioners in this committee were trying to get sir naces out of her and she was able to either correct them or navigate in an interesting way. I'll start with this first one at three and a half hours in gosh, you've watched a lot.

They continued to get like dates wrong throughout this hearing that this guy who's asking this question is his representative, Eric Berlinson. He also mischaracterized Chelsea's wedding as Hillary's wedding, saying that Glen Maxwell attended Hillary's wedding and that Glen Maxwell vacationed with Chelsea after the wedding. This event that he's referencing, this vacation was actually a year before the wedding, and who has a nine Hillary and her lawyers had

to correct all of that stuff. Specifically, Eric Berlinson did not seem to know what he was talking about. At all in this hearing, just constantly got little dates and facts wrong.

the to the matter at hand. And if these people want to pretend that they actually take, you know, what happened to these victims seriously, then they would have a focused, focused effort on the actual subject, not all these wild partisan threads. And I'm now going to discuss before before we before we go and break again about how this

hearing kind of threwout it. But I've condensed down into one section, turned towards the weird multiple times in ways that are sometimes you know, relevant, but oftentimes not earlier.

In this hearing, Hillary stated that she had never been briefed on whether Jeffrey Epstein had foreign intelligence ties while serving in office, but that speculation that Jeffrey Epstein could have been a foreign intel asset is a quote unquote fruitful area of investigation, although she was not made aware of any connection of this sort to well Scretary of State. She was also asked about a passport belonging to Epstein which bore a different name.

I you were of potential vulnerabilities.

to national security implications. This bizarre off topic line of questioning continued nearly an hour later into the hearing.

front of their nose. Right, all of the very clear connections laid out in the Epstein files, those can be ignored, yes, and instead you focused on these like coded messages hidden everywhere, hidden in the backgrounds of videos, people carrying pizza boxes into the Clinton deposition, all this kind of stuff. It's it's it allows them to miss the very the very

clear things that are actually outlined in the files. It is, you know, one of the negative side effects of, you know, of files like this being released is that it allows a lot of points of interest to be honed in on by people charting wildly conspiratorial matrices.

the Hillary Clinton deposition made up a significant chunk. Another chunk that made up a significant portion of time is just Clinton kind of advising and the committee members, both on the Republican and Democrat side, like asking for her advice on how to conduct their own investigation. She advised that they should follow Senator Widens compiled Treasury data on Epstein's financial transactions, and that that data should be subpoened from the Treasury Department. She was asked about how they

could determine if Jeffrey Epstein was a spy. Hillary advised them to send document requests to subpoena the CIA, the Department of National Intelligence counterintelligence departments in the DOJ, saying to quote unquote, cast a wide net. She suggested cooperating with UK investigations into former Prince Andrew and trying to

see if Israel will cooperate in sharing information regarding the investigation. Finally, Hillary suggested to Chairman James Comer that he should advise on how laws could be changed to prevent future abuse based on the committee's knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein's manipulation techniques and mode of operation. But there was like significant chunk of at least like, you know, thirty minutes where she was essentially being asked or advising the committee on how

to do their own job. Just due to the sheering confidence that has been displayed and the clips that I've selected here.

the original black curtains in the background unquote. So they like went in saw this, you know, white table with black curtains. They thought it looked too much like a criminal interrogation or or like a quote unquote hostage situation is what's quoted in the Post article, as opposed to like an official congressional deposition, you know, like an official government venue. So they got like a local carpenter to make this blue paneled backdrop in like a few hours

to put behind Hillary. And that's just an interesting insight into like the thought process of the Clinton team regarding the optics of this.

he doesn't remember that, but this photo does exist. He shook a lot of people's hands, does not remember everyone he meets. He first remembers meeting Jeffrey Epstein for a Clinton Foundation plane trip in two thousand and two. He said he was connected with Epstein through someone named Larry Summers, who told Bill that Jeffrey Epstein made a large donation about ten million dollars to brain research and was a

quote unquote information hungry person. Summers said that Epstein wanted to talk with Bill about economics and politics and offered to take Bill his staff and his secret service detail on Clinton Foundation trips for global humanitarian aid. So Bill saw this as a way to drive the price down for these trips. He took the last one of these flights in two thousand and three. When asked why this relationship ended, Bill said that the AIDS program.

of Epstein's crimes in two thousand and eight. Bill said he had no indication Epstein was trafficking women. Quote There's nothing that I saw when I was around him that made me realize he was trafficking women.

and there has only since been informed of this. In preparation for this testimony, Okay, Bill was asked about a New York Times article claiming to expound on Bill and Epstein's relationship in the nineties, characterized as chummy, which Bill denies. He said that he didn't even know Epstein really during this time, even though they may have been at the same events. He was asked about being asked to write

a personal note to Jeffrey Epstein's mother. Bill said that he never met Jeffrey Epstein's mother and that he wrote a lot of notes to a lot of people that he did not know.

Refers to Jeffrey Epstein as a quote unquote vacuum cleaner of information but was not overtly manipulative early on, saying that Epstein mostly asked about derivatives trading and stock market regulation. Bill was asked if you ever had contact with someone named Chante Davies who was a quote unquote flight attendant on Epstein's plane. Bill confirms that he did, and confirmed that a neck rub took place once with Chante Davies, but denied he ever went to the island.

secret Service protection. He talked about specifically this neck rub incident, saying that he had a sore neck during one of the legs of these Clinton Foundation Aid trips and received a massage this one time.

or people he's only met a few times. A regular occurrence, he's asked to read a section of the letter that people had a hard time transcribing exactly, which makes a reference to Epstein having made errors in his life, and he was asked whether this errors referred to sex crimes. Bill said, no, in the life of someone fifty years old, they're gonna make mistakes. It was a throwaway line in one section of this very short letter. I don't think

it's super relevant. Now around this time when they're reading from this letter is where there's this viral clip of Bill pulling back a copy of a photo from his lawyers, like while smiling. This is circulated a lot. It looks like he's no, like recounting like good memories or something. The piece paper he's pulling back is actually just a copy of a New York Times article. It's not a picture of him and Epstein. It's not a picture of memories. There may be a small photo framed in the picture

included in this New York Times article. It's being passed around, but it's not like he's like flipping through like a year book of like a good moments with friends and like, you know, happily recounting. I think this this little clip's been decontextualized.

flown on the plane. But besides this incident, he had no other conversations with Trump about Epstein or Maxwell.

She claimed that she acknowledge that Bill visited Epstein's house multiple times. Bill denies this. Someone named Virginia Roberts Druffey remarked that she had knowledge that Bill was at Epstein's island. Bill responded by saying that ultimately this person quote unquote reached a different conclusion, and den I declaimed that he flew in a helicopter with Glen Maxwell to the island. The committee member referenced a diary entry as the piece

of information asserting that Bill was on the island. Bill's lawyers asked about the dates for this entry so that they could determine whether Bill was in a different part of the world around this time. But this gets moved on pretty quick. They briefly bring up this picture of Bill in a hot tub in Brunei. He says that he was staying at a hotel during one of these AIDS trips and briefly went to a hot tub. Other

people were present from this trip secret service. That's about a bizarre painting of Bill Clinton wearing Monica Lewinsky's blue dress found in Jeffrey Epstein's apartment. Bill said he'd never seen it before. Was asked to speculate why this painting was made. Lawyers said that the committee can.

About two hours in Bill Clinton is asked if he thinks Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, something they never asked.

notes that I think are interesting. Bill was asked about emails being sent to Glene Maxwell by one of his assistants, and Bill says that he never sent these emails and he's only ever sent two emails in his life, which I do believe I can too.

sitting president to receive a massage. Bill Sawyer has had to argue back and forth because Bill was not a sitting president during the time where this neck massage incident occurred. Bill's once again asked if he was the target of

an intel operation. He says, I doubt it. There was then an extended argument between Mace and Lawyer's the reference to Daily Beast reporting on a statement Bill made after Jeffrey Epstein's to as a nineteen arrest, mischaracterizing two instances where Jeffrey Epstein visited the Clinton office and Bill once visited Jeffrey Epstein's New York ampartment, which he later remarked Jeffrey Epstein was not even present for and Nancy Mace kept asking if Bill lied about only meeting Jeffrey Epstein

at these two times based on the phrasing of the Daily Beast article, But the full statement that the Daily Beast was quoting from also lists the four plane trips, which contained a total of seventeen stops. The Beast article just mischaracterized this as only being two incidents, and Mace was referring to the article, not the actual original statement.

That's resulted in a pretty extensive argument. This leads us to the final clip that I'll play, which I think is kind of the only interesting question across the nine hours of testimony, The only question I think is actually kind of interesting and worthwhile, and it's not actually followed up on in any substantial way. Nacy Basica asks why the Clinton's still associated with Gleade Maxwell after Jeffrey Epstein's first conviction, knowing that Maxwell was one of Epstein's closest associates.

Glaine after the two estate conviction. Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable question to have, and it just doesn't even get focused on very much. Instead, they started talking about this report from an Epstein victim about Bill Clinton allegedly walking into the offices of Vanity Fair and threatening them to not write sex trafficking articles about Jeffrey Epstein, something that Bill obviously denies, and there would be other witnesses for

this event. But like this, this question about the Clinton's extended relationship with Glaine Maxwell after the first conviction is one of like the very last questions asked. It takes them nine hours to get there. Yeah, they don't even follow up on it, and it just kind of ends very very flaccid.

the economy Collapsing episode? This episode was originally supposed to be about tariffs, but while I was writing the tariff episode, a bunch of shit happened, like we invaded or run and Coast b which is the leading Korean stock market index, had its largest single drop in its entire history, which

triggered its circuit breaker. Circuit breakers are a thing that stock markets have now where if the stock market collapses, like if it loses points too fast in a certain period of time, all trading will automatically stop for a bit, so it hits its circuit breaker. The TIE index also hits its circuit breaker, and then in the wee hours

of sort of Monday morning, American time. I start seeing a bunch of people posting that Coastby hit the circuit breaker, and I'm very confused because that happened on like Wednesday, right like this already happened. No, no, no, no, wrong, wrong, happened again. It's two circuit breakers in like four sessions. So this has turned into an unbelievable crisis. Yeah, so we're gonna get the tariff episode at some point, talking about the Supreme Court tariff rulings and stuff like that.

That will happen. There's a lot of interesting stuff there, But right now we need to answer the question is the economy about to collapse? And tendatively it has been held off at least for a little bit. Now. This is being recorded early Monday afternoon on March ninth. By the time this goes out on March tenth, who the fuck knows what will have happened. But let's talk about what happened in the run up to all of this,

because it's very important. So in the lead up to the open of the American markets, we had a massive spike in oil futures, like one of the largest single day spikes in oil futures ever. It looks like it's going to be the apocalypse for the markets. And the reason it looks like this is because and this is something that's genuinely astounding. So one fifth of the world's oil moves through the strain of for Moose. We're going

to talk about this in more detail later. And obviously there is now a war, which means that you can't move oil through it, and people suddenly realized that, oh my god, this is going to raise oil prices.

part of it's twenty three miles wide. Like what are we doing here?

I've ever seen in my entire life. But you know, the ability to close the straight up from news is the reason why even if you are like President Donald Trump, the kind of person who doesn't give a shit if you know your army burns a running and children to death, right, even if you don't care that you fucking bombed a fucking school, you don't fight this war because it fucks

with the money. Now, in anticipation of what looked like it was going to be just a market pounding, Trump gave a phone interview with CBS's senior White House correspondent Weija Jang, who posted this on Twitter. This is her reporting of his statements. This is from Donald Trump, quote I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communication, they've got no air force. He added that the US is quote very far ahead of his initial three to four week timeframe.

They have the capacity for logic and reason. They have the same capacity for logic and reason that we do, and they still act like this. But this has calmed the markets down and it's sent oil prices back down again. We're going to get into why that's kind of nonsense in a little bit. But it's also worth noting in terms of Trump saying the war is nearly over, that every single other quote Trump has said about this war has been He's in this for the long haul. He's

thinking about troops on the ground. He is not going to get bored with it. He doesn't care the gas prices are going up. Someone asked his press secretary about whether he ruled out the draft, and she said no, he hadn't, which is I mean, like they're not gonna do a draft, But like, that's ridiculous, why would you say that. It's also worth noting that so he has a a two hundred and fifty year anniversary commission thing that he set up that he's very very excited about.

That's like it's America's two hundred and fifty year blah blah blah blah blah, and that commissions like one of their big people was ringing the opening bell wall shake this morning. So, you know, I suspect that there's a lot of sort of motivated reasoning here going on with Trump saying, oh, that's fine, it's gonna be fine. The war's nearly over. Do do do do do? Okay, So I quite frankly do not believe the President when he

says that the war is nearly over. I mean, I guess maybe there's a scenario where everything we're about to talk about causes a crisis that is large enough to you know, actually set off Trump pulling out of the war under pressure from his allies in the region, which is to say, the air of monarchies. I don't know to what extent that's actually going to happen, but let's talk about what the crisis here is. So the US's war against Iran has triggered what could be the start

of a full on energy crisis. The energy crisis has been postponed for one day, I guess as of again time of recording, Monday, March ninth, But this could be the start of fall on energy crisis and it's not just me saying this. Here is the subtitle of the Wall Street Journal's big piece on this quote, Traffic through the Straight of Furmuz has ground to a virtual halt, unleashing the most severe energy crisis since the nineteen seventies and threatening the global economy. So that's not good. Now.

I began this episode talking about a collapse on South Korean and high markets, and I was also mentioned by the way that like when that collapse happened, all the other Asian markets kind of eight shit. The Chinese markets were sort of more stable for reasons we'll get you in a second, but like Japan, like the nik was down like four percent, like all of the other Asian

markets kind of eight shit, right, Taiwanese market. And the reason for that is well, again, as I said above, one fifth of the world's oil supply crude oil is shipped through the Strait of Framus. And this is an issue for a country like South Korea, which imports almost all of its oil, you know, and whose economy, like manufacturer economy in particular, is very very heavily dependent on oil.

This is true of a lot of other countries in that region, and South Korea and Thailand and Taiwan and Japan are not countries like China, which have much of oil stockpiles and have the ability to get oiled through other ways. Now, I want to take a second to actually explain what the Strait of Framuz is. So the Strait of Fromuz is a straight it's like there's a

little bit of water, but it's close to land. I talked to said earlier that the narrowest part of it is twenty three miles, so it's very narrow, and it is a passage between the Persian Gulf and effectively the Indian Ocean right and what you're out into the Indian Ocean, you can get to the rest of the world that is, you know, east of that, which is all of Asia, most of the rest of the world that's not west

of you. Right now, she's bordering the Persian Gulf. Who are in the area who need to ship their oil out through here include a run Araq, Bahrain Cotter, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Those are a bunch of oil producing countries.

you are fucking with right now. The things that the Wall Street Journal talks about is that officials in the US and Israel told the Gulf States that there wouldn't be retaliation by Iran, right, that Iran wouldn't target oil facilities, they would just target American military bases. They had a whole thing about how, oh well three tree in the war with Israel, they did only target American military basis.

They didn't like bomb any oil infrastructure. They were sending mister Bean memes in their group chats about how weak the Iranian retaliation was going to be. So this is not just a situation of pure you know, motivated reasoning. We relying to them, et cetera, et cetera. Like the Americans appeared to have actually believed some of this, that Iran's retaliation was going to be weak. I've seen reports that they thought that Aram was out of drones. I

don't know why you would think this, in baffling. Their drones are extremely cheap to produce, like they've used them, but why would you think they didn't have more? And I just want to point out right, so point of reference here was oh Iran showed restraint in the war with Israel. You know, this is a twelve day conflict where Israel and a rol and sort of fired missiles at each other and stuff after Israel assassinated a bunch of people for doing nuclear stuff. But okay, let's look

at this for a second. My brother in Christ, you killed the fucking Ayahtola. This is an existential war for survival of the regime. Of course, they were going to target your oil facilities. Are you fucking kidding me? Your goal here was regime change. You literally assassinated their fucking head of state. You literally killed him. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Oh my god.

these people are stupid. Oh my god. They really truly they really truly believed that Iran was not going to pick up the weapon that it has always had, that has always been the thing for what the reason why you don't fight this fucking war, even if you don't care about Iranian lives, that you're willing to spend American lives? Right, they really thought they wouldn't do it. I just, I just I can't get over this. I just oh my god, Oh I don't know, I don't know. Okay, we're gonna

go to ads a mad hell. I'm not gonna take it any more. Here's some ads Okay, calming down a little bit, let's get back to the actual oil of it all. So let's talk about the quality of the oil here now. Sharp eared listeners may remember that when I talked about Venezuelan oil battery nor Executive Disorder episode about the previous war a couple of months ago, a sentence so unhinged I had to go back check the

date to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating. But no, it was January third, twenty twenty six, when we had our last war with a major oil producer where read in some way incapacitated or killed the head of state. By the way, we're still just like holding Maduro hostage. This is just still a thing that we're doing right now. Incredible stuff, incredible like normal government shit, bad things happening.

But in that episode, which would have been the Executive Disorder that came out on Friday the January ninth, I talked about how Venezuelan crude oil is not very good. Right, It's extremely sour, kind of sucks. The Kumbo composition is bad. The oil in the golf is not like that. This is good oil. This is one fifth of the world's crude oil. Supply, right, And also it is now because

of cutters like liquified natural gas production. This is now also a shutdown of a significant portion of the world's liquified natural gas, which is again extremely important to the economy. And also, you know, one of the biggest sort of climate hoaxes in all of this, right, and I'm saying

climate hoaxes here. There's been a whole push to be like, oh, we should transition to natural gas because it's cleaner than oil, and like kind of a little bit in the sense that like dunking your head into a swamp is probably cleaner than dunking your head directly into like a shitful toilet. And also it's only cleaner assuming that no methane escapes through the production process. But the thing is, methane fucking escapes during the production process of natural as all the

fucking time. And methane is like to get a sense, So we're talking about greenhouse greenhouse gases here, right, and obviously we're familiar with CO two is like the major pollutant that we that we produce. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is so fucked that it is better to light it on fire and have it burn and have it admit that CO two into the air. That is better for the environment than letting fucking methane into it.

It is that fucked of a greenhouse gas, right, And you know a lot of this stuff escapes and and this this is the point that I've been, you know, trying to find a thing to put in this episode.

Pennsylvania and like fracking as like an electoral thing. We can talk about sort of the kind of Andreas Molm fossil capital thesis about the place that you want to produce things being a place that both has stable energy and also a sort of I don't know, I guess the capitalists would call it disciplined workforce, but like a workforce that's not like organized, and that's not militant, so

you can exploit them. And the places where those things are true, for example, like this century largely has been China, where you know, if you try to do independent union organizing, they will arrest you. Sometimes you will get disappeared. And that also coincides with you know, they have an energy grid, and the energy grid is extremely pollution intensive. It still is even as you know, trying to sort of renewable energy push has been happening, is still extremely carbon intensive.

So okay, obviously, like we're in this nightmare because a whole bunch of people who really really really really desperately want us to burn the entire world of lives. They can keep making money. But we're turning to the original thing before I got pissed off about people saying that natural gas is cleaner than oil. It's like, just fucking use literally any other way to generate energy that's not fucking oil or natural gas or coal or I guess

nuclear too. But like, we have other ways of generating power. We could do this. But because we haven't done this, this massive decrease in oil supply because again nothing's fucking going through the Gulf. There's like a couple of ships have gone through. This is causing a crisis in the global economy. I'm going to quote the Wall Street Journal.

If the Strait is still closed this Friday, output in the region could fall by more than four million barrels kind of analystical quoting earlier estimates, the decline could reach about nine million by the end of March, representing almost

a tenth of global demands. Now it's worth noting here, right that you know, you look at a tenth of global demand and you go, oh, okay, so it's like a ten percent reduction, but it's actually way worse than that, because again, people have this tendency to look at oil as just liquid money that moves freely around the world. But that reduction in supply is not evenly distributed across the world. Right, There are countries who have extraordinary needs of it who get their oil from the Middle East.

This is the places like for example, Korea from Thailand, b and mar We're gon We're gonna get to you in a little bit, are places who are relying on this oil. And you know, for South Korea, it's like seventy percent of their oil comes from this region, right, So that ten percent of global demand is not spread eatingly across the world, is intensified into acute crises and

very very specific economies. And this is a compounding crisis because, as the Wall Street Journal points out, like it's not just that the strait is closed for the first time ever, right, this rait has never been closed, Like there was a point where the US was like escorting things through a dream the Iron of Rock War, But like it's never

just been closed before. It's not just that, like you know, oil, natural gas and fertilizer isn't coming out of there either, which is a real fun problem that we'll talk about in a second. This is not just an immediate crisis of we can't move the oil that we have out there is a secondary crisis, which is that where the fuck do you put the oil? Right? If you get one thing out of listening to me talk about oil, it's that again, it's not just liquid money. It's a

material substance. And the actual substance of oil and what it is and how it's produced has really wide reaching political effects, right, because when you take your stuff out of the ground, the system is designed so that it is moved extremely quickly. Now there are countries like a rock that you could in theory still produce oil, right, but there aren't enough containers to store it, so they

have to shop production down. Now you could be like, okay, well but why don't they just ship it out through the Mediterranean, and the answers that the pipelines and the shipping equipment there just don't have the throughput. Oil distribution is very, very flexible, and this is what makes disrupting it harder than something like coal used to be. But it is designed to a point to be sort of nodal and flexible and able to sort of deal with

supply reduction crises, right. It's not designed to deal with this, which is a full on energy crisis level, like, oh by god, we can't get oil out through the trade of removes. This is a scale of issue that can't simply be solved by just moving the supply around and distributing it differently. This is not a solution to this, and so these are having these interlocking effects right because also again, these things are designed to be going constantly and it's not just a thing where you can just

turn it off and turn it back on again. It doesn't work like that. These are actual, very very complicated, tendic goal processes. If you turn these things off, this is again very important. If you turn these wells off, some of them will never turn back on again. So we're talking about permanent damage to the supply. Right, even if tomorrow, right like the war is suddenly over and everything quote unquote goes back to normal, we're talking about

still like permanent damage to the supply. And this is where again you can be like, well, okay, but like, why don't we just condition from oil? And again you can also ask like why should we give a shit about this? There's a few reasons when I say this

is a compounding crisis. The Wall Stree Journal talked about this a little bit, but in every article you read about this, you will see people making the argument that, oh, it's fine, Like the US is more insulated than it was from oil prices in the seventies when it just

like caused a major global crisis. And that's kind of true to a certain extent, Right, the US is an oil producer, but also again, oil is not just something that's used for cars, right, and our domestic economy doesn't just rely on oil like you can't just you know, you can you make plastics out of oil?

on there. You know, there's like Samsung, right, major foam manufacturer, So there's all of this very very high tech stuff too. On the sort of on the bottom end, we're talking about like you can't refine a luminum anymore, you know, right, not that you can't, like like places are shutting down their cassidy to do it because they can't get oil

or they can't afford this oil. To the extent that we're seeing something called force maith Zura and being deployed by a whole bunch of companies across the world in different sectors and forced majoritam is this is this legal concept you can apply that It's like it's like an act of God where for example, like I don't know, if there's like a once in a century earthquake and it like obliterates your factory, You're not legally liable to pay stuff out to people because it's an act of God,

like you, you can't be legally held liable for it. And people are doing this for their aluminum production to say like yeah, sorry, we can't meet our tracks, we can't meet our quotas that you bought from us, Like not our fault, nothing we can do about it. It's happening with oil producers. Because it's also worth noting that it's not just that the Strait is closed. Iran is also hitting oil facilities. Israel is also hitting oil facilities

in Iran. They hit one in Tehran, like a massive one in Tehran that's releasing all of these fucking toxic chemicals into the air, and that has set off a massive ecological crisis because all of these people are Enormous numbers of people in Iran are going to die because of this, not just because of the bombings, but because it turns out when you fucking blow up an oil facility releases a bunch of extremely toxic chemicals into the

air that caused fucking cancer and stuff like that. And so what you're dealing with, right, is this crisis in which all of these different aspects of the economy that rely on oil are impacted. Right, it's basic commodities, it's highly advanced like parts of of like subig conductor manufacturing. It's you know, all of these things that rely on oil are suddenly constrained, and suddenly the supply chains are fragmenting. You know, the US gets things from all over the world,

but the crisis right now has mostly been hitting East Asia. Right. I talked about Korea, we talked about high Land. The thing is, right, crises in East Asia do not stay in East Asia. Like the Asian market collapse, heralded a whole bunch of other debt crises. This is the Asian market class in the nineties, right, Herald's a bunch of debt crises in places like Mexico. Heralds the collapse of

the US economy and draining the dot com bubble. It as say it with me, long time listeners of the show, is what causes the reverse Plaza Accords try to bail out the entire world economy, which is where the US, like nuked its own manufacturing economy. By reversing Reagan's attempt to force all of the rest of the countries in the world to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollars of the US, he compete in manufacturing better, you know. So it affects all these places, you know,

and that that effect will boomerang back here. But as as is always true with American imperialism, the people suffering from this the most are not Americans. It's people in Iran, right, It's people who are getting fucking blown up. It's people who are breathing in toxic chemicals as people whose lives

have been destroyed and ruined by American imperialism. And beyond Iran, it's Pakistan, it's India, it's Bangladesh, it's Taiwan, it's Thailand, it's the Philippines, South Korea, it's Mia and mar like it's Indonesia designan to lesser sent in Genesia. But you know, we're talking about potential crop failures from lack of fertilizer, right,

We're talking about economic ruin. We're talking about the destabilization of the world economy, or talking about people dying for fucking cancer when we're talking about the global economic effects of this. That's what we're really dealing with here, regardless of what happens on the American stock markets, is a whole bunch of people who never had anything to do with this fucking suffering and dying because of the fucking greed and pride and vanity and hatred of the American

ruling class. Now, I'm going to close on a slightly lighter note, which is people who follow the economy very closely will be talking about how kost B, the Korean index, had a massive bubble and that's why it collapsed, and that's why it had like two circuit breakers, and that's why it's going down so much. That's kind of true, right, But that bubble is an AI bubble. Now it is a larger and more concentrated version of the American AI bubble. But you know, the American economy is an AI bubble.

And the thing about AI is that it's propped up by gas prices.

these people are just like absolute clowns. They've been buying into the Golf monarchy's attempts to attract a tech sector there, so they've been hit and Iran has been taking advantage of this by hitting Amazon data centers in the Golf States. So that's another way where this can potentially just sort of toss a nuke into the global economy, is that like the price of running all of these AI things

suddenly starts to increase. And the kind of worst case scenario scenario for this, right, the one that we've been looking at in terms of what could happen to the world economy is what's been being discussed more and more, which is a version of the Crisis of the seven, which is an economic crisis of increasing inflation and also increasing unemployment that completely reshaped the entire global economy. It's why we have deoliberalism, you know, it's a complete collapse

with the social democratic system that I come before. It it changes the entire global world order. Right, the US goes off the gold standard, like things change that had never changed before. And we're going to talk about that more on the tariff episode. But that, to a large extent to the ruling class is what is at stake here, right, It's whether it is worth destroying the global economy in order for Trump to kill what people and I wrong. This has been Nickuldoppen here.

and deported at least four thousand people. In the face of this devastating federal occupation, people are showing up every single day to defend their migrant neighbors in unimaginably beautiful ways. And on the other side of this effective resistance is expansive legal repression all of the many ways the state uses the law and its enforcement mechanisms to crush dissent.

More than four hundred people have been arrested for protesting ICE or following ICE vehicles, with thirty five of them now facing federal charges under eighteen USC one eleven assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. I think it's really important for those of you outside of Minnesota to know how law enforcement and political prosecution are working here because it might come to where you live to and it's different

than other kinds of movement repression I've seen. Instead of the agencies that normally police citizen protesters, like local and state cops or the FBI, it's primarily ICE and CBP who are carrying out arrests, and its Homeland Security investigations doing the investigations. It's happening this way because arrests are mostly happening when people are responding to ICE activity, and so those are the agencies who are present to make arrests.

This impacts everything from how arrests go down and the conditions of incarceration to the kinds of charges that people are catching. To understand what all this actually means, you need to hear from those who are experiencing it, the people who have been detained and prosecuted for protesting ICE. So in this episode you'll hear two interviews from Minneapolis rapid responders. First, you'll hear from Clem and Ray about their experience being arrested out of their car and taken

into ICE attention. And second, Lucy and Isabelle will talk about catching charges and navigating cases during the surge. Stick around at the end for a special treat, a poem from isabel and a new song out of Minneapolis that responds to the surge, and just the heads up before we get into it. In this episode, you're going to hear people talk about their first hand experiences with police violence.

So take care of yourself and if you like the episode, check out the other episodes of Outlaw wherever you listen to podcasts.

oftentimes following them around, which ICE doesn't like. So my question for you two is what kinds of tactics have you witnessed agents used to stop this kind of rapid response organizing.

people with like stocking charges and stuff like that. And yeah, we personally have been We've had agents come up to our windows when we were commuting, the two of us, we've had we followed its like all the way to northeast and a long time, probably like an hour, and then eventually downtown they had sheriffs pull up on us and pull us over and tell us to stop following.

all that data. And when you're there, there's just like intimidation vehicles that will just like drive up right next to your driver's side window and film you and take pictures. So it was certainly in some sort of database at that point. But what's whipple Whipple is the federal building that is near Fort Snelling State Park, which is by the airport, and that's where ICE has been operating out of, and it's the command headquarters for like the entire Upper Midwest.

So wass gone in Minnesota? The Dakota is I think Iowa too?

an abandoned car. And when I went and talked to someone on the street you staying next to it, basically explained the situation of ICE rolled up on them and they ran on foot and left the car, and they basically had to push the car out of the road and then they ended up locking it because the person's documents. So I was staying with the car and calling TOATRA companies that have offered free toes for people who have

gone inducted. And so we were probably there for like, I don't know, more than thirty minutes, and I think as that was happening is when Renee was shot.

as it was happening around us. And then I saw that bright orange mace coming from the passenger window, so they sprayed it directly in Clem's face, and then they reached over and sprayed me, and they were able to open up the doors with the windows smashed, and they dragged us out and he punched me in the jaw, like in the lip really while they cuffed me, and they used pain compliance.

closed so the mace doesn't get in them. And yeah, from there, I fell a few times and kept just being dead weight, and they kept trying to take me to cars, but they didn't know which car they were supposed to go to where they would go to a car, and they didn't have the keys for it, so I would just like kept getting walked in circles, not seeing what was going on, and like hearing the confusion of all of them, until eventually I got put in the back of a car and you got put into a separate car.

like that, and a lot of laughter. I remember the phrases fucking Somali's and later one of them complaining about all these fucking whistles, and I remember thinking like, oh, fuck, yeah, they're working, and wasn't too long before we arrived in the garage. It's just giant garage where they process people and there are mostly agents vehicles, and people have been detained, like a line of people have been detained.

jail for processing. But here what's happening is you're being taken to Whipple, which is the ICE detention center where all non citizens detained by ICE for immigration reasons are also taken and processed. But you're also being brought there, so you're getting a window into ICE operations and you're taken into a place that people also normally don't have access to. It's a pretty high security building that they don't like people from the outside inside.

I love the dirt more than anything. And I don't know how long I was like that, but they kept me on the ground and then eventually brought us in to bring us to the cells.

I'm not going to keep reading this and they were like, that's okay, we have what we need and they took it back and then I got a phone call Clempton up.

the streets right now just because they're working inside the building.

And yeah, so the same thing happened. They try to ask me questions and I said I wouldn't say anything without a lawyer president, and I asked for a phone call, and they did the same thing with the rights where they were going to read them to me, and then what the other detectives said, actually, we don't need to do that, and so one of them just left for a bit, and so I was just like left in the room with the like assistant detective and he just

like asked me some how's your day going question? And I just kind of dead stare at him for like twenty minutes, which felt pretty good because he was very uncomfortable and kept just like avoiding eye contact. And I don't know, it's the small amount of power you can have when you're in a cage. And I got taken back to my room and tried the intercom and stuff i could get a phone call, and they said I'll get a phone call after booking. So I was pretty

worried about what was going to happen. Actually they said they had lawyer president and yeah, these two real cool lores were there that we know and are friends with, and they explained that we'd be out pretty shortly.

to go home. The way we did, and then I took the most painful shower of my life because the water just I did the cold water thing, and my lawyer friend had and me about it was like, you know, try not to get it in your bits, but I totally did and it was excruciating.

we're recording today. I'm curious if you have thoughts on what you've learned and moving through this experience, lessons you've learned that you'd want others to know about about how to move through something like this and keep getting out there as I know you both have.

it's like to face these charges. You'll hear from two Minneapolis based anti ICE protesters facing criminal charges for responding to a raid at Takaia las Cuatros Muthbus that took place back on June third, twenty five. Isabel Lopez faces federal charges and Lucy faces state charges from that day. Their June cases are still open today, and Lucy also caught federal charges after responding to an ICE raid that took place during Operation Metro surch.

raid and response went pretty viral. The operation was heavily militarized, and hundreds of neighbors turned out in protest. Lisa, you were charged with three counts of obstructing, impeding, or assaulting a federal officer and a fourth count of impeding a federal investigation. And Lucy you're facing state level charges from that day and federal assault charges. I'd love to hear from you both a little bit about your experiences getting arrested,

catching charges. What do you want people to know about what that experience was like.

what this administration is trying to do. And it felt very orchestrated. It felt very calculated. Even after, especially after there's a lot of news about my arrest and adding.

This is all allegedly right, But at the same time, I think that I want people to understand that they can make their own calls and own judgment, and how like this justice system isn't that.

facing federal charges. Now there was a handful before that, but we've just seen it massive spike of people who were charged after being released pending charges.

the age. They're trying to raise the stakes of resisting the administration as much as possible because it is a popular movement. It's like generally popular to hate ice, but they're trying to make it as expensive and as irrevocably life destroying for US citizens as it is for people who aren't US citizens.

accused of assault, and then my federal charges. The government has motioned to dismiss them, but we are motioning to dismiss them with prejudice. And during that interaction, I can't really speak to what happened between me and federal officers, but a pregnant woman was assaulted by federal officers. People were tased, people were hit with batons, and that woman had like a ICE agent on top of her for like I don't know a half hour. People said that

she miscarried, she was pregnant. Everyone was saying she was pregnant. She was dragged by one arm between the legs of the ICE officer. They said that she spray painted a car and that was the reason for the arrest. They also said that there was no proof of that either.

of response. My understanding was to ICE having their knee on this pregnant person's back for such a long period of time from what I've seen in the complaint for that day for your case, which is a public record, and I not asking you to speak to whether or not it's true or anything about it, but part of what you're being charged with is I believe de arresting that person, the pregnant person, while they were dragging her, and as result you got assault on the federal officer charges.

So just some context for people listening for the case as we're following it. Those are the public allegations that the government has made. But it was one of the earliest federal cases during the surge and one of the earlier assault cases of this kind. So interesting to hear that it looks like it's headed for a dismissal and exciting for you, but that is the case, Isabelle. There's been community mobilization to support you starting back in June.

Could you speak to what's been effective about that and what you've learned fighting these charges related to this political prosecution.

forty six million dollars this past month. So what I'm trying to say with that is that my community is very much on the scarcity, you know, like it's almost like.

I can do. I can't really like do a lot because of the fear that like if I come into certain spaces, am I being launched?

And we've had like observer trainings, We've had a lot of low key, smaller trainings.

So for me, it's just been really important for me to be with community, to be with people, and like to share my story in the small ways that I can. And you know, we've been doing phone baking campaigns and also just writing in letters. They have a radar on me for sure and know like or where I'm at, where I stand. But I also know that I have a really big community behind me, and I know it's

not just about me. It's about the fact that it's bigger about what could happen to somebody else in our community. And it's been hard, but I think it's it's you know, it's important for us to know that, like, you know, we can keep pushing and like be together in community despite all this, and so, yeah, it has been kind

of hard, especially with the searge. It got even more messy, you know, just with a lot of people trying their buzz to keep their head above the water and helping the families that they can, because a lot of families haven't been able to leave their house.

I know you just spoke about this a little bit, Isabelle, But what it's been like navigating these cases amidst the past couple months of the surge here in the Twin Cities, it's a pretty unique moment to also have these pretty high stakes cases going on, Lucy, if you want to start, it just sucks.

Like it just makes you so stressed out, Like Renee Good was shot in front of me, and it's like like normally I'm not the kind of person that runs away from a situation like that. I'm like would go towards where what happened to like make sure people are okay, or like see if there's anything I can do. And in that situation, I was like what if I just am gonna go to jail like for trying to like

do something. So it's just like it's just contrary to my instincts that if I see someone getting brutalized in the street or they're like they say, you can go to a protest, but that's just what repression is. You know, they come into your house and they look in every single room. You know that they say that you need to go and do drug tests and that you can't have a firearm, and they wanted me to have twenty

four to seven monitoring. I don't know if you had that kind of shit, but it's just like this shit's insane, like and it's over fucking nothing. And so that's why, like I see people on the internet being like, oh, but like all those charges get dropped or whatever. I was like, then fuck you, like you never dealt with this, Like doesn't matter if the charges get dropped. I'm gonna try and apply to fucking Target to be a cashier and then they're gonna be like, actually, you have an

active case. I tried to work at a theater and they were like, can you come explain what happened here? Doesn't matter if you end up going to jail. Yeah, going to jail sucks, but repression is like it's the thing in and of itself.

for cons of release. And those are conditions that are enforced by a pre trial probation officer, like person who might come to visit your house or you have to call when you have cop interactions, or who facilitates drug testing, depending on what your conditions are. So just some background on that for anyone who's unfamiliar.

in it. I tried resharing one of it. I only shared like one of reshared one of the tags, and then I tried resharing another tag that kind of explained what to do to help with my case, and like Instagram, don't let me post it. You know, these are this is like minor shit, like this isn't like that big of a deal. But it's also just like okay, like yeah, they want to make sure that you're not being seen

or heard. And I'm pretty fortunate to have like a job where like they're paying me to do community work and they have known me, so like I'm I feel

really lucky. At the same time, it's also just been really hard because, like you know, some people are more reluctant to have me in the room when it comes to like organizing, are doing certain things because of that, because like you know, of where my case stands, and some people have like you know, actually kind of walked away from being my friend because you know that they were also there that day on June third, and just also kind of being afraid about what would happen to them.

But on the other side of that, you know, there's also been friends that are like I'm gonna be here, I'm down, like, don't don't like know you where you know, which has been great.

gasline is a right word. I think it's just like imposing a lie of just like what is right and what is wrong and seeing everybody also just being very gas lit and having you know, the news, having a certain narrative of like what is right, what is wrong, what has been said, what has not been said, what really happened, what didn't happen, And also just arresting independent journalists. I think just goes to show how much constitution has not been constituted.

And the only way that we can really understand that new world is when we understand the truth.

And you know, one thing that I did with some of the NDI and collective, we made this really dope graphic that says Motherland on it and it's all the Americas having roots from the global South, you know, and being supple thick like has been really like so key for me to know that like I have every right to be here, that like a lot of the legitimacy that is constituted quote unquote for me, that doesn't come from for me, that's not my truth.

tied with theirs. And I know that we like have every right to be here from the people that are from the global South as well, because of the fact that we haven't been able to like fully thrive in the motherland. We haven't been fully thrived in all the Americas. And you know, a lot of people don't want to immigrate. A lot of people don't want to migrate. They don't want to leave their motherland. But I know that we have built homes here, we have built communities here, and I think.

And another update, thousands of agents have left the Twin Cities. I get to see my neighbors out of their houses a little more often now, but daily life is still colored by ongoing abductions, disappeared family members, and shock waves of state violence that have hit our migrant neighbors. I know I said it in the beginning, but just to say it to close. As much as there is devastating violence and terror happening here, there is incredibly magnificent resistance

and community connection happening every single day. Neighbors are showing up and stopping abductions, They're watching people get killed in the street for doing it, and they're showing up the next day to continue. There's a kind of fearlessness and a kind of love that is in this community that I've never seen anywhere else. So as much as things are horrible, things are also beautiful. And I want you

to know that. The theme music you heard in this episode was the song Star by twofa one, a Dakota and bariqua artist based out of Minneapolis.

the Supreme Court ruling from a few weeks ago. So, Trump had been claiming the ability to do tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, an act that famously never says the word tariff, and the Supreme Court was like, no, actually, that the International Economic Powers Act does not give you the power to levy tariffs, a thing that it does

not say that you can do. So Trump got extremely mad about this, and he imposed a ten percent tariff across the board using a different law, as he said he was going to do. Now, this ten percent across the board tariff was run through section one twenty two of the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four. We're going

to get into that, okay. So he imposes a ten percent tariff using this like different authority from section one twenty two, and the next day he goes, I'm going to raise the tariff right to fifteen percents, and this is the teriff rate on the entire world. But then he just forgot to do it because he got distracted by, i think, invading Iran. So he has never actually, you know, raised the tariff rate to fifteen percent, which he said

that he had done. So it's now just at ten percent on the entire world instead of you know, all of the sort of individual country terifts that have been in place before. And that's sort of the focus of today's episode is about these tariffs, because these tariffs are already being challenged in court, and I think that that challenge has a very very good chance of winning fairly easily.

And the reason that those tariffs have a very good chance of being overturned by the courts is that unlike the IEPA tarriffs that he was using, where he was claiming illegally the authority to just do whatever he wanted. This is why you would wake up in the morning and there's like one hundred percent teriff on China, like seven hundred percent tariff of Vietnam. Blah blah blah blah blah. Trump was claiming that that Act let him do whatever he wanted. It did not. Court found that he did not.

But that was how he was using tariffs, and it was the basis of how he was using terrors for diplomacy, right. You know, he would put a tariff on someone at random, claiming this power, and then he would like enter negotiations with them. And he can't do that anymore. Now what he's done in its place is again imposed this terriff's using section one twenty two of the Trade Act. Now this authority is very, very different than the authority Trump

was claiming before. I'm just going to read it because it mostly explains itself. Do not worry about the international payment problems or balance payments deficit that it mentions at the beginning. We're going to go over that in a second.

What's important for our purposes here is that in order to put tariffs into effect, quote, whenever fundamental international payment problems require special import measures to restrict imports one to deal with large and serious United States balance of payments deficits, two to prevent an imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar in foreign exchange markets, or three to cooperate with other countries in correcting an international balance of payments disequilibrium.

The President shall proclaim for a period not exceeding one hundred and fifty days, unless such a period is extended by a Nact of Congress, a temporary surch charge not to exceed fifteen percent out of lorum in the form of duties in addition to those already opposed if any article is imported into the US. Okay, so let's look

at the limits first, right. Instead of any rate of tariff on any country, which is what Trump had been doing, Section one twenty two only lets you set an up to fifteen percent tariff on every country in the world and only lasts for one hundred and fifty days unless Congress votes to approve it. This sets up a giant fight in Congress that Trump is not going to win. Now.

We may never get to that point because the same right wing legal group who funded the lawsuit that overturned the IEPA stuff is going after Section one twenty two and they're going to win now. They're going to win because Section one twenty two has literally never been implemented before. The tariffs specifically never been implemented. There is a reason for that, and the reason is that to even deploy Section one twenty two tariffs in the first place, you

need quote fundamental international payment problems. One to deal with large and serious United States balance of payments deficits to the print dollar depreciation, and cooperation with other countries to correct international ballots of payments disequilibrium. So those are very specific conditions. What does that mean? What does it mean for there to be a problem with balance of payments? This requires us to understand what the fuck balance of

payments is. And it is here where I am fulfilling my promise from that Executive Disorder episode where I said I will explain it in the full episode. All right, we're doing it, and oh fucking boy, are you in for it, because Jesus Christ, oh my god, holy shit,

this stuff is annoyingly convoluted. But it is also extremely important to how the global economy functions, how it's changed, and you know, it's not really relevant for the US at all, for reasons we will get into, but it is extremely relevant for the economies of a bunch of developing countries. So, okay, let's start off with balance of payments. So what is the balance of payments? I'm just gonna start off by quoting the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Balance

of payments. Quote is a summary of all the transactions involving goods, services, and investments between one country and all other countries over a given time. Any transaction that causes money to flow into a country is a credit to balance payment accounts, and any transaction that flows out is a debt. So this is a record of literally every purchase in capital movement that goes in and out of a country. Right, So it's goods services, debt payments, and

things can either be credits or debts. This is the FED explains. You know things that are debts, right, Things that like make your account go lower is you know, debt payments, capital transfer payments, like buying imports. If you were importing stuff from China, that is a debt. And then there are things that are credits to make account go up. So that's other countries paying for exports, capital transfer receipts, and you know financial assets and that's other

countries paying for your exports. So this is tracked in like two accounts. There's a capital and finances account. I'm just gonna call it the capital account because that's the most common name for it, and it's shorter. So there's the capital account that is all movement of capital in and out of the country, and then there's a current account, which is like a trade record of all goods and services.

Technically there's also stuff from like interest from an investment goes there, but we don't really care about that for our purposes. The current account is the account that's like trade, and then there's a capital account, which is the account that's all of the capital moving in and out. Now, importantly, these two accounts, right, these two accounts compose balance of trade. Right, this record has two accounts in it. Those are the two accounts. If you line up all the credits and

debits and then they cancel out and equal zero. The value of all goods being imported or exported, as as services and stuff like that too, is the same as the amount of capital moving in and out of the country. The two accounts will cancel out. And this is what's really confusing about balance of payments, because why the fuck is that true? Right? Why are the capital flows and trade balance Why can't you have an imbalance? And the

answer is that's how the accounting system works. And the reason the accounting system like that is because of what balance of payments is now. Weirdly, if you want a more detailed explanation, there are a billion detailed explanations that are extremely convoluted and annoying. The Reserve Bank of Australia weirdly has like a readable one for people who aren't like engrossed and financial stuff. However, come up, I'm going

to try to explain it. So, balance of payments is the record of everything that moves in and out of a country, you know, So that's goods, that services, that's money, it's stocked. When I say it tracks everything, right, was a record of everything? That means it's recording both sides of a transaction. So what does that mean? Okay, imagine a receipt, right, it's a receipt for a burger. You have bought one hamburger. On the receipt is the thing you bought, the burger and how much it cost, which

is the money you pay for it. Balance of payments tracks both the burger and the money you paid for it. Because it tracked international trade, right, it's tracking international movement of stuff, and because both the burger and the money changed hands across borders. Right, it tracks both of them. And that is why when you put all the credits and debts from both accounts together, it adds to zero, right, because you know, think about like the net transfer of

funds on that burger. Right, on the one hand, there is the burger, and on the other hand there is you know, how much money you paid for the burger, and those two things are equivalent. Right. The value of the burger is how much it's worth, So okay, that means that in the accounting of it, right, the account on the receipt, which shows both of these things is balanced because it's tracking both of them, right. And this

is the same way it works for an investment. You buy shares of a company, So okay, there's the money for the shares and the shares themselves, and they're both being tracked and they both go into the record that

balance of payments keeps. So there are some convoluted things about this, and this is the reason why you need to combine both accounts instead of each account being balanced by themselves, because sometimes the record of the burger goes in one account and the record of the money for that burger goes at a different account This is convoluted. It's because of how income is classified. It's a mess.

You can go read the Berserve Bank of Australia. But that's why you need both accounts together to get the balance of payments, right, because both the burger and the money for the burger are in the balance of payments somewhere, but they might go in different accounts, so you need to put them together. And that's how you get the balance of payments. And see that's why it's called the balance of payments, right, they balance out. See now you're

getting it. Now you're getting it. This is why it always bounces out to zero because it's the balance of both the money and the object. Right. So sharp eared listeners may be going, wait, hold on. So Section one twenty two, which is where the tarifts are from, is about a deficit in the balance of payments. How can you have a deficit if it always balances out to zero? And the answer is, technically speaking, you can't. So Okay,

what the fuck is going on here? Why is Trump using and Trump stifically is claiming that there's a balance of payments deficit and there's a crisis in order to impose these tariffs. So what is going on here? Why does this law exist? You will find out after these ads whoa cliffhanger? A. So to explain what is going on here, we need to take a detour back in time to when this was written. This Act was written in nineteen seventy four, but we need to go back

a little further to nineteen seventy one. Now, in nineteen seventy one, Richard Nixon makes probably the most consequential in a macro sense, change to how currency functions on a global scale in probably half a millennia when he pulled US off the gold standard. So what does this mean? It means that Nixon ended what was called dollar convertibility, or the ability to go to the government and trade

your dollar for a certain amount of gold. So this fixes the value of the dollar to the value of gold. So the value of your currency is sort of relatively constant in that like it's this much gold, right, But it means that your macroeconomic policy is constrained by your gold supply. So why did Nixon take the US off the gold standard? And what does SAVA do with balance of payments? Surprisingly everything? So, okay, what I've been describing

about balance of payments. I've been describing modern balance of payments. If you go back and read stuff from the FED from this era, when they talk about balance of payments or talking about flows of gold. In this period, every dollar that leaves the country represents an amount of gold, and the more of it that leaves the country, the more sure that puts on the US gold reserves, because

you know, there's less and less of it. This is what they're talking about when they talk about balance of payments.

very important. Trade deficits and balance of payments deficits not the same thing at all. In fact, in this whole period when the US is running these massive balanced payments deficits to become a problem, they have a trade surplus. Right, they have a trade surplus. So like, okay, how are they like losing gold then, right, like, how are dollars

flowing out of the country. Well, it turns out that what's actually making this a balance of account deficit, where like dollars are leaving the economy, which means gold leaving the US's vaults, is that the US is spending too much of its military. It's always speaking military spending. It is always fucking military spending. Holy shit, It's the reason everything is broken. It's it's literally just always military spending. We're spending too much gold on the damn military. Right.

So the deficit and you were you're talking about a bounce payments deficit. The actual deficit is that in order to pay for wars and to do military bases, they are spending money in other countries. And this is technically like part of the bounce of payments, right, because it's

money leaving the country. And you know, like technically speaking, the balance of payments as we've been talking about it, right, like the account is balanced, but we keep spending dollars in order to obtain military bases and then also in order to bomb Korea and Vietnam, and the dollars have to come from somewhere. Now, again, the dollar at this

point is gold. It represents a fixed amount of gold that the US has, and those dollars are coming from the US government, so that that's what the actual quote unquote deficit is in this case. Right, you will see this described as like, oh my god, they're paying for stuff from the current account for the capitol count.

those dollars into gold, you'll be okay. Enter one Charles de Gaulle, president of France, who begins to unmasks convert American dollars into gold in order to end the dollar's reign as the world reserve currency. Because it was pissed off at the US running the world. This is not like Charles de Gaull, anti imperialist. De Gaull does not want like the end of imperialism. Degaull wants there to be equal footing, or more equal footing between the different

impure powers. Right. He just wants France to be like a major world power, imperialist power as well. Right. The power the US gets from being the world reserve currency is extremely important. So what is the reserve currency? The reserve currency is the currency that, like all global trade is done in. And because it's the currency that all global trade is done in, all of the world's central banks have to hold like a bunch of that currency, right,

And that that's why it's called the reserve currency. But I say all of the world central banks have to hold it except for the United States, which does not have to hold dollars because it's our fucking currency and if we want more, we can just print more. Right. So this is time they called like seniorage privilege. But like that, the power of this right is enormous, and the dollar status is the reserve currency is actually really important to us in terms of explaining these sort of

balance of payments deficits and crises. So, okay, here's a Saint Louis fed on why countries have to hold wood reserve currencies.

Insurance for other economic contingencies such as wars or natural disasters. Now, the second one is what's of concern to us, right, it's insurance against sudden loss of ability to pay for imports.

And that's what's commonly known as a balance of payments crisis in the current day, when you run out of dollars to pay for your imports or to pay for your foreign debt, which is a real issue too, right, Usually your money goes to the foreign debt and then you're out of currency and then you can't you know,

like import more shit. This is a balance of payments crisis, and they're actually pretty common or decently common in a bunch of developing countries, and they are almost always completely catastrophic. It's one of the foremost causes of modern revolutions because when you have one of these balance of payments crises, you can't afford to fucking import things because you don't

have enough dollars. You can't import oil or you know, fertilizer or food because you don't have enough dollars to do it, and your government has gone through all of the dollar reserves. As I talked about in the ED, Sri Lanka is probably the most recent example that the country you know, just ran out of dollars to purchase shit with, and the ensuing unbelievably hideous shit that everyone had to suffer through cause people to burn down the

president's fucking mansion. You will know, and I said, this is before you will know if the US has a bounance of payments crisis, because you will see the smoke and flames outside of your window, and it's such. It's like Sri Lanka, right like the revolution in Sudan. Like the reason that there's a civil war in Sudan right now to some extent is because of one of these

crises that set off a revolution. Even though you know What usually happens in these cases, right, is that a country has one of these crises, and that someone, usually the International Monetary Fund, will give them a loan, and so they will give them dollars in exchange for you know, like turning the entire economy of that country into a debt servicing machine, which means, you know, like taking food out of the mouths of babies to pay that debt back.

And this also often causes revolutions, right, Like, so, like Sudan had a balance of payments crisis and in like twenty eighteen, late twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, and they eventually got an IMF bailout deal, but like the price of bread increased by two hundred fifty percent and people drove omer al Basher out of power. However, come U, you will note that I have been saying that these crises

are caused because countries run out of dollars. But we can't run out of dollars because those are United States dollars. We can just fucking print them. We literally cannot have this kind of bounce of payments crisis because it's all our own money, and we can just print shit in our own money. Jesus Christ, this is so silly, losing my mind, Like it's not possible, you can't do it. Oh my god. Now, however, why is the law like this, right, Like, why is there a law written talking about the US

as if it could have a bowets of payments deficit? Again, Like, right up until nineteen seventy one, when Nixon took the US off the gold standard, it actually was possible to, you know, make the US run out of dollars because you could run out of gold. And this is what like the goal was trying to do, you know, by like making the US convert all his dollars into gold.

But Nixon just said, fuck it. The dollars of floating currency now, and since its value isn't pegged to a certain amount of anything else, right, And that's the way it's been ever since, we can't have these crises. Now.

The countries that have these crises in modern day are ones that peg their currency to like a specific amount of dollars, right, And they tend to run out of the reserves trying to like stabilize the value of their currency by offering conversions of their currency into the dollar at the official rate, by like letting people go convert their currency as of dollars. But again, we can't have

that because it's dollars. We owe shit in dollars. And also, in order to have like a full on balance payments crisis where you can't pay for things right, it requires no one to be like willing to lend you money. And it's like, okay, like who is not going to lend the United States of America money? Like are you kidding me? This is this is the fagas crisis of

all time. This bill, however, was passed again in like nineteen seventy four, and it was only three years after the US was off the gold standard, and so people were like, Okay, we're going to do this thing in case we ever go back to a situation where this stuff is possible. But right now, like we literally structurally cannot have a balance of payments crisis, Like we can't have one. You can't have a balance of payments deficits.

This is not the same as a trade deficit. Trump is trying to argue that's, oh, we have a trade deficit. Our current's account, which is like the trade account is like four percent below balance. But then if you look at the capital account and you put them together a balances because that's just how it works. Oh, that means

we're in trouble and nonsense, absolutely bullshit. He's also claiming that there's like fundamental international payment problems, which I know there aren't, because fundamental international payment problems means you can't pay for your imports or like your debt, and if we weren't able to do that, you would all know. So, ah, they're going to lose this lawsuit because this is the fakest crisis that has ever existed. And now you know how fake it is, and also what balance of payments

is you know? Okay, I'm going to close on a story about this, which is that there is a scenario in which this knowledge has actually saved countries before, and specifically, like the country that this saved was Cuba. There's like the Cuban Revolution, right, and immediately after the Cuban Revolution,

the government it's not like at their communists. Yet there's this very very short window where it's like not quite entirely clear what the fuck is going to be going on with this new like Cuban government, and the government sends chay Guevara to the US to negotiate with a bunch of American banks, right, and che Guevara actually understands this stuff, right, he knows a balance of payments is, he knows he's able to like talk to all of the sort of Manhattan bankers who are talking about this

stuff on their terms, right, and like they literally literally the line they say about it was like, yeah, he talks like a banker, right, he understands bounce of payments, He understands all of this stuff and what he's able to do. And this is critically like why the nation of Cuba, like like why the Cuban Revolution succeeded was that he was able to get the US to give

him all of his gold. But because he was able to convince these bankers, because he understood what they were talking about in their language, and these able convinced the US governments to get him all this fucking gold because he understood how the shit works. And that's why Cuba was like functional as a country after that, because they had managed to get all of their gold reserves, which

previously had been being held in the US. So you know, you never know when you too might be at the head of a better revolution or you might be the one person in the new Revolutionary Coalition who understands what balance of payments is and you too, can get your gold out of the United States before the government realizes that you're communists and like would have like locked it

down and frozen it and taken the gold. So this is what it could happen here, the podcast that helps you take your country's gold reserves like che guevara, Oh.

Some small news items here at the top. Ahead of National Espresso Martini Day this Sunday, Buffalo Wild Wings is releasing a wing flavored espresso Proteiny cocktail made with muscle milk protein powder infused with the Buffalo Dry rub, which also coats the rim of the glass.

settlement from the FSCNA state in twenty twenty one. An NPR found that there are still thirty seven missing pages related to these interviews.

children that was done there at least equal to his island. Now, this ranch goes under a new name and it's owned by a new person, and we'll talk about who exactly that is in a second. But there were several attempts by local law enforcement to investigate the ranch, particularly to dig for human remains, but those were kind of stymied by ongoing FBI investigations that seem very shady in retrospect, given how long they waited to look for bodies on

the ranch. But they're doing that now. I don't know if they're going to find anything. A lot of the talk about bodies is in like individual anonymous reports that said, I'm glad they're looking. They should be looking at this ranch. And now I can give the promised punchline, which is that the current guy who owns Jeffrey Epstein's ranch is Don Hauffines, who's running for state comptroller in Texas and who used to run one of the big dealerships in

my childhood. Huffines has it in this case, Huffins might have evidence that Jeffrey Epstein murdered people. Great is that is bleak.

Shield of the Americas. When you see this Shield of the America's this is not Christian. When you see the Shield of America's website, you will fucking be laughing. Then at SEC Rubio and a SEC War are incredible leaders and I look forward to working with them closely to dismantle cartels poured drugs into our nation and killed our children and grandchildren.

Mullen is a bombastic MAGA supporter. He's probably best known with trying to start a fight in Congress with Sean O'Brien and generally being an extremely loyal support of Trump in all cases, apart from January sixth, where for a while he supported prosecutions. Now he's much more like equivocating on that. He also at one point attempted to set up his own evacuation of US citizens from Afghanistan during

the Biden deministration. He is an enrolled citizen the Cherokee Nation, which, as I commented before, has been the source of far too many democratic critiques which are really kind of disgusting and bigoted.

little bit about the Shield of the Americas. The program was announced last weekend at Trump's golf resort in southern Florida. It currently has a web page with it a really incredible placeholder graphic. Maybe I should just share this. If you go to Shield of the America's.

along with other Caribbean island nations. There was also a representative from Chile's president elect, who obviously couldn't sign because they don't have the authority to do so. Yet, what it seems to be is an extension of what we've seen already right of the quote unquote Donroe doctrine.

Just so you know, and I think it's best to explain this with the strikes that were carried out just a few days before this, right on the third of Marty in the six so much southcomb so that that would be the US Regional Command, which encompasses South America and Central America, announced it quote launched operations against quote designated terrorist organizations in Ecuador.

very least with Ecuadorian troops. Potentially, the US is just there to quote unquote train, advise, and assist, right, but it signals a much more like VI approach to this anti cartel mission. Yeah, in this case, the two groups Los Jooneiros and Los Lobos, they were both listed as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists in September of last year.

added the Clandale Golfer right. The golf cartel would be how people refer to in English in December of twenty five to the FTO list. I didn't pick this up at the time, and again I haven't seen a great deal of reporting on it. The reason this concerns me is that it pertains to the trig bar terrorism related in admissibility guidelines. The trig bar can bar people for being admissible to the United States, and it could be

a serious barrier to migrants. Organizations can be considered terrorists for the purpose of the trig bar if they are not ftos, But the addition of the golf Cartel to the FTO list will make it very hard for people seeking asylum in the United States who have crossed a Darien, because it is not possible for them to do that, at least if they are coming from south to north, which was a durction of travel until twenty twenty five, without transiting golf Cartel territory, and it would not be

possible for that to happen without interacting with them in some way. And so this is just potentially very concerning. I want to do more reporting on the trig bar pursuing that with some public records requests, which will just take some time. Trump has very clearly made the link between this coalition and the much larger international coalition against the Islamic State. I've said this before, but he clearly sees Operation Inherent Resolve as a very successful model for foreign policy.

the start of our war with Iran. We've moved a significant chunk, if not the absolute majority, it's a little unclear, of the anti missile and anti drone weaponry, the major stuff that we had protecting other parts of the world that the United States has bases in like South Korea, over to the Middle East and over to intercept Iranian missiles primarily headed either towards US forces or most often

to Israel. But even with all of the shit that we've redeployed from other areas, there's only so many of the munitions that we use because they're very expensive, and particularly the drones that are on is using, like the Shahed drones, are very cheap. So starting at kind of the start of hostilities, we were looking about six point seven percent Iranian drones got through. The intercept got through.

And this is just in the UAE, but you can assume that it's fairly accurate to other theaters, right because we have a lot of missile defense and a lot of drone events in the UAE. So at the start of hostilities, about six points seven percent of Iranian Shaheed drones we're getting through the UAE's differences.

that's a massive issue. So we'll continue. I'll be doing a whole episode on how the US is running out of bullets. Bullets being you know, a stand in tern for more advanced munitions. But I've got something else to talk about right now that's also involved in the Iranian theater. Particularly, I'm going to talk about mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Let's do some adds for products that you may not be able to buy if naval traffic is interdicted through the Strait of horm Moos so by him now, so

get him now books. So there's an evidence that's come out kind of in the last couple of days. I start broken on the New Republic, But I believe CBS News was the origin point that Iran started laying minds in the Strait before Donald Trump publicly declared he was going, he wanted to take it over. So basically, after we killed a huge chunk of the Iranian government, Trump started public amusing, maybe we'll just take over the Strait of

horror moves, and Iran started mining the shit out of it. Now, this is a problem for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the Strait is probably the most I mean, it's arguably the most important energy transit point on planet Earth, right Like, it's about a fifth of all crude oil shipments go through the Strait. Ye, that's not the only thing that goes through there, but it is an incredible amount of the world's crude oil supply travels through this strait.

And Tehran's always kind of had the option of closing it by just dumping a bunch of mines in there. Mines are incredibly cheap. You can drop mines from very small boats. The US Navy is very good at blowing up big boats, but if you have a shipload of small boats that have a shitload of mines, it's basically impossible to stop an adversary like Iran from laying a fuckload of mines. And that will make it basically untenable

financially for anyone to run oil through the strait. If you never know if one of your boats is going to get hit by a fucking sea mine, it makes it hard to get insure to run a boat through the strait of horn moves. Most of these mines are not capable of I mean, these minds in general are not capable of destroying the kind of bolt callars that.

have sunk sixteen mine layers. That was from US Syncom, although it's kind of unclear because at least half of those seem to have been inactive at the time, So these may have just been bigger mind layers that we hit at the start of our attacks on their navy, and then when we realized there's going to be a news cycle about mines in the Strait, let's claim, you know, right whatever. After it came out that around had in fact been laying mines, President Trump truthed, we want them

removed immediately. If for any reason, minds were placed and they are not removed forthwith I've never heard them use fourthwith before.

step in the right direction. That sounds kind of desperate, and it sounds kind of desperate because the United States is in a uniquely dog shit position to deal with c minds right specifically now, we made a really funny decision, and by we, I mean the Trump administration made a really funny decision basically immediately before we declared war on Iran, a country we've known has always threatened to mine the strait of horror moves every time we fucked with them,

And that funny decision was in January, the Navy decommissioned for Avengers class mine countermeasureships, which were the last mind countermeasureships we had in the Persian goal. Now we have other boats that were pretty sure can do the job, but we've never tried. And the funny thing about the boats that we're currently going to be using for to take out my mind is that they're pre existing boats

that were not built to take out mines. We basically have like they're called like operations packages that you add to the boat to add capability. One of the capabilities they have these little like basically drone torpedo things that can go out and seek out mines. They've got an enhanced like radar package I guess or whatever. They're better at looking for mines because the boats that they added these packages to were not initially meant for d mining.

They're littoral combat ships. Lcs's widely considered to be the worst boats in the entire US Navy. In fact, in the Navy, the acronym LCS stands for little crappy ships because they're bad. They've been very bad. Basically every time we have like tested how will these things function and like a real fight, it's the answer has been like terribly. They're not good ships. They kind of suck ass. Now we'll see if the mind countermeasures that they put on

these boats like make them superior to the old Avenger class. However, there's a lot of issues with the mind countermeasure packages that they've they've been making for these and I want to read a quote from an article published by famous leftist and thus untrustworthy news source, the US Naval Institute. Quote. Initially set for an initial operational capability in twenty fifteen, the MCM package went through a development process punctuated by

stops and program failures. For example, the first craft that could tow the AQS twenty son are to hunt the bulk of minds suffered reliability problems and was scrapped. The service also canceled a plan for the IMAGE sixtys to toe the AQS twenty. After years of program changes, the packages coalesced around a few core main systems. So the development of these mcum mission packages has been troubled for a very long time, which is what delayed the retirement

of the Avenger class minehunters previously. And the Navy's now saying they totally work now and we're all going to find out in real time if they do. And the last funny thing I have to say is the four decommissioned to venture anti MIAs ships. Two of them at least have hilarious names. Two of them makes sense. One of them was the USS Century, perfectly reasonable name for a d mining ship. Okay. The other was the USS Dextrous. Kind of a weird name, but whatever. And then you

have the USS Devastator and the USS Gladiator. What is a mine shift devastates? It's for dem it's to stop things from getting devastated. Anyway, that's my report, Okay, good to know, and let's pick up with Iran. I want to start by talking about, like the speculation regarding partner forces. I think some of it has been just like a little bit misinformed. Starways people have been talking about the

Blochistan Liberation Army. They were only added to the United States FTO list last summer, which leads me to believe that the Trump administration is not positively.

IIGC from Kurdistan and liberate our land. Therefore, we cannot and must not base our policies on the shifts in US rhetoric. America has its own plans regarding the overthrow and subsequent administration of Iran, and we have our plan for the liberation administration of Roger lad rojolatt referring to eastern Kurdistan.

human suffering and death. This is especially true it seems that Trump is somewhat growing.

an Iranian nuclear site quote protected by granite. Both Fordoh and Natans were struck last year and have underground elements. Four DOH is about eighty meters below ground. Yeah, and that was the site that required a US strike. Israel did not have the means to knock that one out. But to the best of my knowledge, FOURDOU is now out of commission following the strikes in Operation Midnight Hammer. Rehich happening in twenty twenty five. Perhaps he's referring to

another subterranean site, or perhaps he's confusing this with earlier information. Evidently, you can't just destroy uranium, right, Like, if there is a rich nuclear material, then then that is still there.

and drones. I spoke to quite a few people who are in this sort of shipping security world, and one of their concerns is, like, when they say fast attack vessels, they're talking about very small boats with mounted machine guns, right, operating in large groups and swarming tankers or other ships going through the straight ofform moods, which would be quite challenging to defend ships from, especially of their like large

civilian ships, right. I know some people have been speculating about the CM three to ZHO two missiles that around ordered from China. Those are like quote unquote carrier killer missiles. I don't believe they have those yet, though they do will probably find out soon enough.

We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives here and there is also, as disturbingly as anything else, the specter of active Russian age to Iran putting in danger American lives.

We've now learned that many more people were seriously injured, as well as hitting some over their horizon radar systems that we spoke about last week. Finally, the US is carrying out operations against hashtaal Shabby popular mobilization forces in a rack. This is getting a lot less reporting, but it seems like if there are boots on the ground anywhere right now, this would be where they would be right.

They're using things like apaches in a tens, They're not using standoff munitions delivered from a great distance, and so anything that is likely to result in either needing people to support targets or needing people to rescue a pilot of a playing or a helicopter gets shut down, would more likely at this point be there.

You know, there had been massive collapses in the Asian market from rising oil prices, and then Trump said that quote, the war is very complete, pretty much in a phone interview with the journalist from NBC, and this caused a resurrection of the markets. Now, this is completely disconnected from the actual reality of the war and functioned entirely to again just calling these markets on Tuesday, So that was Monday. On Tuesday, Trump speech quote, We've already won in many ways,

but we haven't won enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this

long running danger once and for all. Which, Okay, that's gibberish. Now, Trump has specifically begun to address the fact that again you can't move oil tankers through the straighter four moves because Iran is going to just carry out strikes on them, and he said, quote, We're also focused on keeping energy and oil flows to the world, and I will not allow a terrorist regime to hold the world hostage and

attempt to stop the globe's oil supply. And if Iran does anything to do that, they'll get hit at a much much harder level. I will take out those targets that were easy and that I mentioned before, We'll take them out. So quickly, they'll never be able to recover. Ever, if they want to play that game, they better not play that game. In the long run, oil supplies will be dramatically more secure without the threat of Iranian ships, drones, missiles,

nuclear menace, or anything. So what he's saying here is that if Iran keeps the straight closed, he's going to destroy them. But A, he's already in a war with them, and B this just means it as long as it wrong, keeps it straight closed, then the war keeps going, which keeps a straight closed longer, which keeps the war going. So this is great. Trumps also directly asked by a reporter about whether the war is going to keep going. Quote thank you, thank you, mister president. You said the

war is quote very complete. But your Defense secretary says, this is just the beginning. So which is it? And how long should Americans be prepared for this war to last for? And he immediately starts going into metaphysics. Quote well, I think you could say both the beginning. It's the beginning of building a new country. And then he eventually says, so you know, you could look at that statement. We

could call it a tremendous success. Right now, as we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further, and we're going further. But the big risks on that war have been over for three days. We wipe them out in the first two days. So that says nothing other than probably the war is going to keep going.

I'm going going to read a quote from that Raiders piece quote the US Navy has refused near daily requests from the shipping industry for military escorts through this trade of from mows since the start of the war on Iran, saying the risk of attacks is too high for now, according to sources familiar with the matter, which yeah, no shit, of course isn't happening. There's no way for it to happen.

Have you seen an oil tinker. The largest of these things is two fifths of a kilometer long, right, and some of them are you know, half that size, so they are like one fifth of a kilometer long, but you can't escort that through straight is and I kind of emphasize this enough twenty three miles wide at its narrowest point.

this in my episode earlier in the week. It's not just oil, it's things like critical chemical components for fertilizer that comes through here. It's natural gas. It's also helium, which is a very very critical element for a whole bunch of heavy industry that is actually very scarce, and a huge amount of the world's helium supply has to

travel through the Gulf. And there are so many kinds of munitions besides mines that iron cans use to hit boats from rockets and missiles to drones, just shooting at them with the guns on boats. That thing if apparently done now now. Trump also said that he was waving oil related sanctions on certain countries to reduce prices. It's

not clear what this means. It's probably Russia. Reuters has claimed that it's about the US temporary allowing India to purchase Russian oil that's been like stranded at See, it's very unclear what's going on there. On Thursday, we got we got a bunch of claims from the administration that escorting tankers through the Strait was their planned the whole time,

which no, it wasn't. This is just going to continue to be an absolute nightmare because if Trump can't figure out a way to get oil through there, he's either going to have to end the war or the world economy is going to just implode. Yeah, we'll be tracking that situation. There's also another crisis that has begun to brew, which is the crisis in the so called private credit market, which is this is stuff that used to be called

shadow banking. I'm going to go into more detail on this later as it becomes more and more a sort of relevant. But private credit slash shadow banking is a series of things that are like a bank, but they're not regulated, So we are talking about trillions of dollars of assets. There has been a huge run basically on the shadow banks, to the point where several very large banks have paused the ability to take money out of them.

Now it's difficult to report on this because we don't actually know anything about how many people are pulling their money out or what the effect on this is because there are no reporting requirements because eise are shadow banks, and the whole point about them is that they're not subject to the regular regulations that regular banking will be

subject to. So that's another looming economic crisis that we're all sort of just going to have to deal with, on top of Trump attempting to sort of destroy the economy with this war and Iran. And finally, I want to close by talking about a very good piece and crime thing called history is Repeating Itself, a Lebanese perspective on the war in palestein Lebanon and Iran. That is an interview with friend of the show Iliau talking about a part of this war that hasn't basically ignored in

the media, which is to quote Ilia. Israel has ordered the forced evacuation, effectively the ethnic cleansing of the entirety of southern Lebanon, the Hey and parts of Becca. This has been a horrifying campaign that has involved Israel bombing major Lebanese cities, including repeated bombings of Beirut, as well as a systematic destruction of Lebanese villages by Israeli army

in the areas they've occupied in the south. The Israeli invasion has killed six hundred people in Lebanon so far, and that number will be higher by the time we're listening to this. This campaign does not seem to have an endpoint and is continuing as the American and an Israeli war in Iran also continues to grind on. Yeah, put a transgoal on your couch, Thank you, Mia.

which Trump later called his number one priority. Paxton knows that the passing of the Act is very unlikely, but by signaling support for the President's number one priority, he's hoping to gain favor and maybe even steal the endorsement away from Cornyn or convinced Trump not to give an endorsement, which would help him in the runoff election.

electoral liabilities. For the general election day on March fifth, seven of the biggest tech companies signed President Trump's rate Payer Protection Pledge, empowering the private sector to build their own power infrastructure like power plans, microgrids, and substations, while also agreeing to quote bring or buy new generation resources and cover the cost of all power delivery infrastructure upgrades required for their data centers, ensuring such expenses are not

passed to American households unquote. And that is per the White House. So this expounds on the rate player Protection Pledge that Trump announced during his State of the Unit address. We have a little bit more details now. The pledge has been signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Open Ai, Oracle,

and Xai. These companies will quote unquote voluntarily negotiate new separate rate structures with utilities and state governments wherever they build new data centers, and will quote commit to pay these rates for the power and related infrastructure brought online to service their data centers, whether they use the electricity

or not, unquote, to prevent blackouts and power shortages. The pledge also promises that AI companies and hyperscalers will also quote coordinate with grid operators to make backup generation resources available at times of emergency, contributing to a more reliable grid unquote. This pledge is not legally binding, but like I said, it will empower the private sector to develop power plant infrastructure.

One ied was ignited and thrown towards the group of protesters. Another was dropped in front of several NYPD officers, but neither device successfully detonated.

watched ISIS propaganda videos on his phone. The Criminal Complaints says that en route to the NYPD precinct, Bilot told officers, quote, this isn't a religion that just stands when people talk about the blessed name of the prophet.

military success in Iran. Last Friday, Trump started talking about Cuba, saying, quote, Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is going to fall too. They want to make a deal so badly. They want to make a deal, and so I'm going to put Marco over there and we'll see how that works out unquote. That same day in Florida, Trump was asked about this Cuba deal and what do it mean for the US.

instructional information on possible criminal acts people could commit. After Swiss authorities verified the FBI's request, proton mail was legally required to submit payment data, which identified a name tied to the account through a credit card. Swiss authorities then forwarded that information to the FBI via the Mutual Legal Assistance treaty. This individual has not been charged with the crime and no email contents were provided to either the

Swiss authorities or the FBI. This is Edwards shown the head of communications for Proton quote, Proton only provides the limited information that we have when issued with a legally binding order from Swiss authorities, which can only happen after all Swiss legal checks are passed. This is an important distinction because Proton operates exclusively under Swiss law. Proton accepts

payments via cryptocurrency, cash and also credit card. If you use a credit card, we do have access to the payment identifier, which can be used to identify the credit card holder from the card issuer. We check all legal orders received from authorities, and we understood that a law enforcement officer was shot and explosive devices were involved, and we verified that Swiss legal requirements were met unquote. That's their main statement regarding the handover of this credit card information.

and twenty twenty about three thousand. I think this generally reflects the rate at which Proton has grown, rather than them becoming more likely to respond to these requests.