— Trump’s legal serfs: when law firms bow to the Don. Trump is bragging about how he’s forced five more major US law firms to kiss his a-- and give away $940 million in free services to his favorite causes. So far, the rogues gallery of cowardly law firms which have put money above principle includes Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, Paul Weiss, Skadden Milbank & Willkie, and Farr & Gallagher. On the other hand, three major firms are suing Trump’s administration for their efforts to intimidate and extort them (my words, not theirs), including Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale. And over 1600 attorneys who work for the big firms that have bowed down to Trump’s intimidation have signed a letter demanding they do better.
They wrote: “When we are united, we cannot be intimidated. These tactics only work if the majority does not speak up. Our hope was that our employers, some of the most profitable law firms in the world, would lead the way. That has not yet been the case.” One of the very first things authoritarians do when they seize control of a country — from Hitler in the 1930s to Putin in the early 2000s — is to seize control of the country’s legal system.
Typically they follow a twofold strategy of punishing independent judges and terrifying attorneys; Trump is doing both with a shocking level of speed and zeal. This is how democracy dies, not with a bang but with a pro bono agreement.
— The Empire shudders: how Trump’s trade tantrum could trigger America’s fall. China can destroy Trump (and America) if Mark Carney doesn’t do the job first: China produces 90% of the world’s rare earth minerals, which America needs to build chips, jet engines, advanced displays, missiles, avionics, and a whole spectrum of other applications, many specific to the military and advanced computer manufacturing. And on April 4th, in response to Trump’s first tariff tantrum, they put export controls on the seven (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium) most critical for US manufacturers and the US military. We have some reserves, but if this lasts for months it could seriously damage our military and advanced manufacturing capabilities.
Trump appears to believe that President Xi will come to him any day now to “kiss my a--” (as he bragged a few days ago about other governments’ leaders), but the Chinese dictator is showing no signs of bending or bowing, responding to Trump’s “stupid” 145% tariffs with a blanket 125% tariff of their own.
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — himself the former Chairman of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada (the equivalents of our Fed) — got together last week with leaders of Europe and Japan to plan their response to Trump. About $8.5 trillion of the US’ $36 trillion national debt is held by foreign governments (as Treasuries), including $350 billion by Canada, $1 trillion by Japan, and between $1.5 and $2 by the EU. If they were to coordinate the process of dumping their bonds, he reportedly suggested, it would flood the market with US bonds and make it harder for the the American Treasury Department to sell new debt issues, forcing us to increase the rate of interest we pay.
This would drive up US mortgages and other credit, make it harder for companies to finance expansion and new operations, and increase the cost to the US government to fund our own debt: the result, if sustained over a few months, could be devastating. And, sure enough, it appears that’s exactly what they did this past week when bond yields shot up, forcing Trump to put a 90-day pause on most of his tariffs.
This threatens America’s position as the holder of the world’s reserve currency, as well as possibly producing a liquidity crisis similar to what had Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen’s hands trembling when, in 2008, he announced that the nation’s banking system had “frozen up” and needed a multi-trillion-dollar bailout from Congress and our Fed (which Bush gave to the banks and their executives), and throw America into a severe recession or possibly even a second Republican Great Depression. Should Carney, et al, continue dumping US debt and China jump in by bailing on their $760 billion in treasuries, it could bring our financial system to its knees just as Republicans in Congress are trying to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion (which will have to be borrowed by selling that amount in treasuries) to fund their planned $4.5 trillion tax gift to America’s billionaires.
Highlighting the danger, the headline in yesterday’s Financial Times is, for finance experts, a virtual primal scream: Liquidity worsens in $29tn Treasury market as volatility soars. Hang onto your seats (and your assets): this could get insanely wild — and dangerous for all of us — before long. (And it’s amazing how the mainstream media is missing/ignoring these two stories.)
— Was there a “lack of urgency” in the Supreme Court deportation ruling about the Maryland father wrongly deported to El Salvador’s most notorious prison? You Betcha... Will the Republican justices keep sucking up to Trump? Is a frog’s a-- watertight? The Supreme Court issued one of the most mumbling, mealy-mouthed decisions in a century, giving Trump’s gestapo plenty of time to continue the torture of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the husband of a US citizen and father of three (including a nonverbal autistic child) along with over 200 others, over 70% of whom have no criminal record according to CBS. The Trump regime’s lawyers went to court yesterday and basically stalled, saying they didn’t know where Garcia is or what his status is, a clear and naked lie.
If nothing else, when El Salvador’s hard-right (arguably neo-Nazi) president Nayib Bukele visits the White House this coming Monday, he could simply bring Garcia and the others with him. But don’t hold your breath; he and Trump are both gleeful about their ability to incarcerate and torture a legal US resident without any legal due process in complete violation of the US Constitution and international law. The simple reality is that Trump is transforming America into a police state, step by step, and aligning himself with some of the planet’s worst autocrats while crapping on our closest allies…just like I’ll bet Putin taught him how to do.
— Seniors are first in the line of fire as Trump’s tariff bomb explodes. Top Senate Democrats just proposed an emergency Social Security payment boost:Senators Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden, and Elizabeth Warren are putting forward legislation to increase the monthly Social Security payments of everybody in the country by $200 a month to compensate for the coming Trump tariff inflation. The Social Security Emergency Inflation Relief Actis a response to the early signs that inflation — and shortages — are about to explode as both major and minor retailers across the nation are cancelling orders for Chinese goods rather than pay a 145% import tax (tariff). These cancellations will produce shortages and drive up prices, hitting low income people the hardest (as Republican policies always do).
If nothing changes over the next week or two, expect major inflationary impact to sweep America starting in a big way next month. Meanwhile, Republicans promise to kill this Senate effort to give a raise to people on Social Security, because it may show down their plan to hand trillions to their billionaire benefactors. Finally, I’m already seeing signs that America has already slipped into a recession: Every time we’ve had a recession in the 22 years I’ve been doing my radio show, the early indicator is that advertisers begin to cut back on their ad budgets for radio. I heard from our ad agency this week that this has begun, so we’re looking at ways to tighten our belts, financially speaking. I predict, based on this “early warning system” that hasn’t failed me yet, that we’ll all see the impact of the Trump recession within a few weeks. We gave Trump a loaded gun and he pointed it straight at our feet and began blasting away. Will this break the spell this cult leader has on his followers? Stay tuned.
— Authoritarian Alert! There’s a new dress code in Trump’s Washington, and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook. Remember Mao Zedong and those little red pins with a gold image of his head on them? Stalin had them, too, as does Kim Jong Un; as Dean Blundell notes, if you fail to wear your Kim pin properly, you can get arrested in North Korea. Trump apparently loved the idea of having similar pins with his head on them, as do some of his cabinet members; FCC Chairman Brendan Carr was spotted wearing a Trump head pin in DC this week. Trump’s apparently selling pure gold versions, although you can get gold-like ones on amazon for as little as ten bucks. What’s next? A mandate that we all carry a little booklet of Trump’s most famous sayings? (“I moved on her like a b-----. I couldn't get there and she was married. … You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p-----. You can do anything.”) G-d help us all…
— The SAVE Act: What could possibly go wrong with the House-passed bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote — Hillary sends out a warning about it — I've been warning about this for months! I’ve written several times about the GOP’s latest strategy to purge millions of American women from the nation’s voting rolls with their new SAVE Act, which passed the House this past week (with the votes of four democrats: Ed Case (HI), Henry Cuellar (TX), Jared Golden (ME), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA). They’re doing this because women are about 7% more likely to vote Democratic than men. As Hillary Clinton noted on Xitter yesterday: “The House just passed the Republican voter suppression measure that threatens voting access for millions of Americans, including 69 million women whose married names don’t match their birth certificates.”
Ever since 1980, when Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich proclaimed the goal of the GOP should be to “reduce the voting population,” the party has sponsored thousands of pieces of legislation — hundreds of which have been made into law — to make it harder to register, harder to vote, and easier to get purged from voting rolls or have your vote thrown out. This bill, which will next be debated in the Senate (will Fetterman join Republicans and vote for it like these four turncoat Dems did in the House?), is the most serious assault on women’s right to vote since Republicans first opposed the 19th Amendment in 1920. Let your senators know you’re not happy and they should vote to filibuster and then defeat it.
— Crazy Alert! The next market crash or maybe even a war may be engineered by a robot — and nobody will be accountable. “Evil robots” could start a financial crisis or a world war in order to profit the corporations that own them, without those corporations even knowing about it?The Bank of England — not an organization prone to conspiracy thinking — issued a warning this week about what might happen when stock trading firms deploy AI robots to handle making money for them. The fear is that the robots will figure out what Naomi Klein wrote an entire book about: Disasters represent an opportunity to make big bucks. If an AI computer could infiltrate an air traffic control system and crash a plane, for example, right after betting big on airline stocks falling, it could make a fortune for its owners.
The Bank’s report noted, “Models might learn that stress events increase their opportunity to make profit and so take actions actively to increase the likelihood of such events.” They added: “AI could facilitate collusion or other forms of market manipulation” without the “human manager’s intention or awareness.” Yikes! Maybe it’s time for some legislation to get this genie under control?
NOW READ: Everything Trump is doing makes perfect sense if you understand one simple fact