Trump Revives Clinton Scandal
Trump Revives Clinton Scandal
“Trump officials are analyzing whether to remove federal protections for national monuments spanning millions of acres in the West,” reports The Washington Post — “in order to spur energy development on public lands.”
If you’re familiar with Jim Rickards’ “American birthright” thesis, this development comes as no surprise. Team Trump is keen to tap into the mineral wealth on federal lands — mostly west of the Mississippi — valued at up to $150 trillion.
The Post article cites “two people familiar with the matter and an internal Interior Department document” suggesting the feds are looking to scale back the size of at least six national monuments in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
“The push would spark an intense legal fight over the right of a president to grant sweeping lands protections under the 1906 Antiquities Act — and take them away.”
It was under that authority that, for instance, President Bill Clinton created one of the monuments in question in 1996 — the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.
Your editor can’t help wondering: Is the inclusion of Grand Staircase-Escalante a sly middle finger to the Clintons?
No one remembers now thanks to his Oval Office dalliances with Monica Lewinsky — but a much bigger scandal threatened to take down Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s.
At the time, Grand Staircase-Escalante was thought to be home to the world’s biggest deposit of an unusually clean-burning type of coal.
The world’s second-biggest deposit was in Indonesia and owned by the Riady family. The Riadys controlled a conglomerate called the Lippo Group — an outfit long rumored to have illegally funneled donations to the Clintons.
Was the declaration of a national monument a favor for the Riadys? House Republicans certainly thought so.
Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) told a Salt Lake City newspaper that it was an "uncanny coincidence that the high-grade, clean-burning coal found within the monument's borders is rivaled only by a deposit in Indonesia. The potential connection to the Lippo Group is obvious."
It was a far more serious scandal than lying under oath about an extramarital affair. Why did nothing come of it?
The answer is that Republicans had their own campaign finance dirty laundry that they were keen to cover up.
In his 2002 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, independent journalist Greg Palast reported that senior members of Congress cut a sweetheart deal during Clinton’s second term.
The Republicans ended up going after Clinton only for the sex stuff — and not for the Clintons’ connections to the Riadys. In exchange, the Democrats dropped any attempt to look into the Koch brothers, who laundered contributions to GOP candidates in key congressional districts during 1996.
As Palast wrote, “The true, unreported reason for the collapse of the inquiry most threatening to Clinton — the Indonesia money chain, which could have knocked him out of office — reveals the ultimate measure of Koch influence: that Republicans sacrificed their case against the president to keep their secret benefactors under wraps.”
Hmmm… Donald Trump has no great love for either the Kochs or the Clintons. So opening up Grand Staircase-Escalante is a two-fer — a symbolic act of “draining the swamp” and tapping into a new resource to ramp up U.S. energy production.
Meanwhile, “I believe President Trump’s administration is moments away from unlocking a brand-new opportunity in the American birthright,” says Jim Rickards.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with the national monuments — nor is it related to anything Jim has previously shared in the pages of Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence.
Tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. EDT, Jim will convene an online briefing in which he promises “I’ll show you a patented strategy that could accelerate your gains from this American birthright, and discuss three new opportunities to target up to 10 times your money or more in a matter of weeks — regardless of what’s happening in the markets.”
To reserve your spot, just click this link: We’ll email you all the follow-up information you’ll need to be ready for tomorrow.
Snarled Supply Chains (Here We Go Again)
The dramatic slowdown in the shipment of goods from China to the United States — a development we started sniffing out a week ago today — is too big to ignore now.
“Essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers has ceased,” says Gene Seroka, executive director at the Port of Los Angeles. He expects import volumes to drop 35% in two weeks.
This tidbit showed up in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal — buried on page B11.
Meanwhile at the Port of Seattle, “arrivals of ships carrying automobiles in April was down 36%,” reports The Seattle Times. “The number of container vessels arriving or departing from Seattle and Tacoma between April 1 and April 15 was down around 27% compared with the first half of March and by around 24% from April 1–15, 2024."
With so much uncertainty over tariffs, a growing number of cargo orders are simply being cancelled.
“The consequence will be empty shelves in U.S. stores in a few weeks and COVID-like shortages for consumers and for firms using Chinese products as intermediate goods.”
So said executives at the private-equity giant Apollo Global Management (APO) on a recent conference call with Wall Street analysts.
Gary Cohn — who was chair of the White House National Economic Council under Trump 45 and is vice chair at IBM these days — tells CBS News that consumers will see impacts by “the last couple weeks of May.”
Craig Fuller, CEO of the logistics data firm FreightWaves, tells CNBC the real bite will come during back-to-school season.
And the toy industry is already putting out an infographic warning Christmas might be cancelled…
It’s not too soon to think about how this will affect you personally.
For instance, I took delivery this morning on a stock-up supply of needles and syringes I use to medicate one of the elderly cats in our household. If World Bank figures are to be believed, close to two-thirds of the U.S. syringe supply comes from China.
Wall Street seems unconcerned about this state of affairs, the new trading week off to a quiet start.
After notching a 4.6% gain last week, the S&P 500 is pancake-flat at last check — 5,524. The Dow is posting a modest gain, the Nasdaq a modest loss. Earnings will be in focus later this week as four of the “Magnificent 7” names report their numbers Wednesday and Thursday — Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Amazon.
The strain in the bond market has eased for a moment, pushing yields lower; the yield on a 10-year Treasury is now under 4.25% for the first time in nearly three weeks.
Gold held the line on $3,300 at the end of last week, but at the moment it’s down to $3,295. Silver’s back below $33. Crude is losing ground at $62.18.
Bitcoin made another run past $95,000 over the weekend but now it’s back to $94,525.
We’d be remiss if we overlooked the power outage that’s hit Spain, Portugal and part of France.
At last check it seems the authorities in Spain and Portugal are pointing fingers at each other for mismanagement. We’ll surely learn more as the day goes on.
This much, however, is already clear — courtesy of Bloomberg’s straight-shooting energy reporter Javier Blas…
Reminder: Battery technology still hasn’t evolved to a point where solar and wind can provide the always-on “baseload” power needed to prevent the grid from going down under stress.
War Warning
Imagine a conflict as intractable as Israel-Palestine, but with nukes on both sides.
Last Tuesday, gunmen attacked a group of tourists in Kashmir — gorgeous mountainous territory governed by India but claimed by Pakistan. At least 26 people were killed.
India’s government was quick to blame Pakistan’s government, cutting off water from the Indus River flowing toward Pakistan — a move that Pakistan’s top civil-military decision-making body calls “an act of war.”
Pakistan’s defense minister says the attack was “staged to create some sort of a crisis in the region, particularly for us.” Pakistan has withdrawn from the Simla Agreement of 1972 — an always-shaky deal in which India and Pakistan agreed to stay on either side of a temporary “line of control.”
India’s government has cancelled vacations for all hospital workers in Kashmir, ordering them to set up “24/7 control rooms” to handle emergencies.
Before Washington and Moscow started engaging in a full-on proxy war in Ukraine… India-Pakistan was the most likely flashpoint for nuclear war anywhere on the globe.
“India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, have fought four wars over divided Kashmir since 1947,” wrote the veteran war correspondent Eric Margolis in 2019 — when we last had occasion to sound an alarm about this conflict.
“Both sides’ nuclear forces are on a hair-trigger alert, greatly increasing the risks of an accidental nuclear exchange.
“Rand Corp. estimated a decade ago that an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange would kill 2 million immediately and 100 million in ensuing weeks. India’s and Pakistan’s major water sources would be contaminated. Clouds of radioactive dust would blow around the globe.”
A more recent estimate by Physicians for Social Responsibility pegged the numbers at 20 million dead in the first week and 2 billion from the resulting global famine.
Obviously this conflict isn’t getting as much attention from Western media as Ukraine-Russia or Israel-Palestine. We pray that events will simmer down, as they did in 2019 — but if they don’t, at least you’ve got a heads-up now.
Oopsie, Department of Transportation Edition
Here’s a great moment in government outreach on social media — courtesy of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy…
About 40% of the replies had something to do with curbing the powers of the TSA — if not abolishing the TSA altogether.
Granted, the TSA operates under the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Transportation.
But Duffy or whoever manages DOT’s social media should’ve known they’d get this backlash regardless. It’s a glorious thing to watch…
“Only Poor People Sell Their Assets”
“Great People, Great Job” says the subject line of an email we were heartened to get.
“Enjoy very much everyone's posts and recommendations/advice - Jim, Byron, Dan, Sean, Zach, Matt, Emily, Dave. If I left anyone out, please forgive me! Truly inspiring and very helpful and educational.
“One comment only, in regards to an otherwise wonderful show from Jekyll Island, that is in regard to the American birthright" issue.
“In full agreement that something has to be done to get us out of a mess that took us decades to craft, but I was once told, and tend to believe wholeheartedly, that is, ‘Only poor people sell their assets.’”
Dave responds: True enough. But don’t forget that at an estimated $150 trillion, the mineral wealth under the lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies potentially dwarfs the $36 trillion national debt.
And as another saying goes, “Debt is the money of slaves.”
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets
P.S. Here’s one more reminder that Jim Rickards is onto an entirely new angle of the American birthright story — something that could have a direct impact on your wealth starting in May.
It all has to do with Donald Trump’s Executive Order No. 4196 — a document Jim says will send shock waves through Wall Street starting only days from now.
For that reason, Jim is calling an online strategy session where you can get many of the essential details. It’s set for tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. EDT. Spots are filling fast, so follow this link to reserve yours.
