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The World’s Biggest Shell Game

In 2001, Enron’s collapse revealed that a corporation could manufacture the appearance of financial health by creating thousands of shell companies, the purpose of which was to buy the real corporation’s toxic assets, keeping them hidden from investors and regulators. Enron created more than 3,000 such shell companies, officially dubbed “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPV). When the shell game unraveled, $30 billion in hidden debt materialized overnight.

Lehman Brothers used this principle with “Repo 105,” temporarily moving $50 billion in assets off its balance sheet at quarter-end to SPVs, then retrieving them days later after reporting deadlines passed. Lehman’s bankruptcy examiner documented the fraud across 2,200 pages. No one went to prison.

Citigroup ran $80 billion through off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicles. When the commercial paper market froze in 2008, Citigroup had to re-absorb $58 billion, requiring a $45 billion government bailout. Bear Stearns created hedge fund SPVs housing toxic mortgage securities. When they imploded in 2007, they served as the canary in the coal mine for the entire financial system.

Bigger Than Corporations

The crucial question is: Does the same architecture operate at the level of nation-states? It does, through the mechanism of dollar reserve requirements and Treasury market structure.

Here is how it works. The United States issues Treasury bonds to finance deficit spending. Under the post-Bretton Woods dollar reserve system, central banks worldwide are expected (and in practice effectively required) to hold significant portions of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasury securities. The Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund frameworks for reserve adequacy create structural pressure on smaller countries to accumulate Treasuries as a demonstration of financial stability and as insurance against currency crises.

The result: Japan holds approximately $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. China holds approximately $760 billion. The United Kingdom, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, Belgium, and Ireland each hold hundreds of billions. Together, foreign countries hold approximately $8.5 trillion of the $36 trillion U.S. national debt.

The Carrot and the Stick

These countries are not freely choosing to hold American debt the way a private investor chooses a stock. Many are incentivized, and in some cases coerced, into doing so by the international monetary system.

Countries that attempt to de-dollarize their reserves face currency instability, reduced access to dollar swap lines, and in some cases direct U.S. diplomatic and financial pressure. Iraq announced it would price oil in euros in 2000. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi proposed a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions. Both countries experienced U.S. military intervention shortly thereafter. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern has not gone unnoticed by smaller nations.

Without foreign central-bank demand structurally supporting the Treasury market, the interest rates required to attract voluntary buyers would be considerably higher. Foreign reserve requirements effectively subsidize American borrowing costs, suppress Treasury yields, and support the dollar’s reserve status in a mutually reinforcing cycle that benefits the issuer enormously.

Enron’s SPVs kept toxic assets off the balance sheet, allowing rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P to maintain investment-grade ratings until days before the collapse. The structural foreign demand for Treasuries similarly influences how sovereign debt markets evaluate American creditworthiness. When Moody’s downgraded the United States from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025, it cited the $36 trillion debt and deficit trajectory. But that downgrade was decades late relative to what the raw numbers would suggest.

Loss Is Inevitable

The difference between Enron’s SPVs and the sovereign SPV system is that Enron collapsed suddenly. The dollar reserve system is unwinding slowly — through BRICS de-dollarization efforts, bilateral currency swap agreements between China and trading partners, Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of yuan for oil sales, and the gradual diversification of central bank reserves away from Treasuries toward gold, which global central banks purchased at record rates in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

When enough of the SPV network decides to stop absorbing the parent’s liabilities, the parent’s true balance sheet becomes visible. What happened to Enron in 2001, and to Lehman in 2008, will eventually happen to any entity that has confused the appearance of solvency with its substance.

The shell game always ends the same way.

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Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians

The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

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‘Sip your coffee while watching the sunrise’: How Israel is colonizing the West Bank by selling Palestinian land to Jewish Americans

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community. 

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers.

The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

The promotional advertising for these settlements deploys seductive language to attract investment. An advertisement for a real estate project in Kfar Eldad, located within the Gush Etzion Regional Council southeast of Bethlehem, pitches a rural lifestyle “close to Jerusalem, far from the routine.”  The ad reads: “Time flows a bit differently around here. In the morning you can sip your coffee while watching the sunrise, and just 12 minutes later, before your coffee has even cooled, find yourself in Jerusalem. And in the evening, you’ll return to soothing tranquility. This makes Kfar Eldad the perfect alternative for those seeking reasonably priced housing close to Jerusalem, but away from the noise and traffic of city life.”

Behind the glossy brochures and manicured images of “modern residential communities” lie painful chapters of systematic Palestinian land confiscation — a process that has expanded in recent years to encompass nearly half of the total area that Israeli occupation authorities have declared “state lands” since the Oslo Accords were signed.

The “soothing tranquility” in the hills and open terrain of Bethlehem was, until recently, home to Palestinian and Bedouin communities who practiced seasonal farming and herding. Those original inhabitants were barred from accessing their land, which was confiscated under military orders decades ago, before settlement projects were built on it.

“I owned land in the area of the Gush Etzion bloc’s expansion — land covered in hanging grapevines and almond trees of all kinds,” Ibrahim Ataallah, a resident of Khirbet Beit Skaria, told Mondoweiss. “But I was barred from accessing it after a confiscation order was issued [in 1984]. Even though we in Beit Skaria hold the legal documents proving ownership of the land we live on, they see us as an obstacle to the settlement expansion in Gush Etzion.”

As Atallah described the location of his plot of land, and the grapevines and almond trees it once bore, he looked at the maps and advertisements published by Hebrew real estate websites advertising properties in the Gush Etzion area. An advertisement describing the features of a plot for sale caught his eye. Though he could not pinpoint his own land on the map due to its lack of clarity, the descriptions of the land for sale and the lifestyle being offered to potential settlers hit close to home. 

“I really did drink my coffee at sunrise and waited for my friends from Jerusalem to join me,” he said. “We would talk about the price of grapes at the market, the coffee still warm by the time they arrived.”

“All that separates us from Jerusalem was a few kilometers,” he lamented. Today, that short distance no longer implies access. As a Palestinian ID holder, Atallah is barred from entering Jerusalem without a permit, transforming what was once a routine trip to visit friends into a near-impossible journey.

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ICE Arrests Illegal Previously Deported FIVE TIMES After Explicit Texts Sent to ICE Agent He Thought Was a 14-Year-Old Girl

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrest of an illegal caught up in a sting operation.

Federico Pascual-Jimenez, from Mexico, thought he was sending sexually explicit text messages to a 14-year-old girl.

It was, in fact, an ICE agent.

In his texts, Pascual-Jimenez said he thought “age doesn’t matter.”

ICE announced on X, “.@ICEgov has ARRESTED a criminal illegal PEDOPHILE.”

“Federico Pascual-Jimenez, from Mexico, believed he was sending text messages to a 14-year-old girl who was actually an ICE agent. Pascual-Jimenez sent sexually explicit texts and said he thought ‘age doesn’t matter.’”

“This sicko’s criminal history includes a conviction for DUI, and he has been deported 5 TIMES in the past.”

“ICE is working with officials in South Dakota to ensure he is NEVER released into our streets again.”

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Biden-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump’s New Verification System to Remove Foreign Nationals from Voter Rolls

A federal judge, appointed by President Joe Biden, has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from using an updated verification system, known as the SAVE program, to remove foreign nationals from state voter rolls.

On Monday, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by Biden, issued an order to prevent the Trump administration from using a streamlined version of the federal government’s SAVE program to combat voter fraud.

The update to SAVE allowed states to more quickly verify that only American citizens are voting in federal elections by no longer requiring that all nine digits of a voter registrant’s Social Security Number have to be entered to verify eligibility.

“This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote,” Sooknanan, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, wrote:

In the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data. [Emphasis added]

But decades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections. The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens. [Emphasis added]

A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesman previously told Breitbart News that the updated SAVE program was necessary to ensure “America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens.”

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Democrats Put Ukraine Ahead Of American Troops 

Democrats seem more determined to keep the war in Ukraine going than to fund America’s war against Iran. The Pentagon says the Iran fight has cost about $37 billion, while nearly $200 billion has been poured into Ukraine.

That tells you everything about Washington’s broken priorities. Iran directly threatens America. Ukraine’s war needs to end. American troops and American security must come first.

Congressman Brandon Gill also exposed the Smithsonian’s eye-popping woke agenda, including racially charged propaganda involving Mickey Mouse.

Americans are paying for museums, not left-wing indoctrination.

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JAWBONE Act: FCC Democrat Backs Cruz Anti-Censorship Bill

FCC member Anna Gomez has been describing what happens when a federal regulator leans on broadcasters over programming it dislikes.

This month, she endorsed the JAWBONE Act, a Ted Cruz bill that would let the broadcasters and platforms on the receiving end of that pressure haul federal officials into court and collect money from them.

Punchbowl News reported the endorsement on July 14. The bill Gomez is backing, S. 4749, carries the name Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, which nobody will ever say out loud, and it was introduced on June 11 by Cruz and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden.

It would make it unlawful for any federal agency, or any officer or employee acting “under color or pretense of office or employment,” to coerce or attempt to coerce a broadcaster, an online platform or an AI provider into taking what the text calls a content action, meaning adding, altering or deleting speech.

Coercion is defined broadly as “to take a harmful, hostile, or unfavorable action, to imply the possibility of taking such action, or to threaten such action.”

The prohibition reaches conduct undertaken “for the purpose of, or if a reasonable person would understand the coercion or attempted coercion to be for the purpose of, incentivizing the broadcaster or provider to take a content action.”

The bill then lists eight factors a court should weigh in deciding whether something counts as coercion. Read them against the record built in Missouri v. Biden and the fit is almost exact.

Courts are told to consider the word choice and tone of the communication, whether the official had regulatory or enforcement authority over the recipient, whether the communication referred to adverse consequences, whether it was public or private, whether it carried a disclaimer saying it lacked legal force, and whether it led the recipient to act contrary to its own policies.

Two of the eight cut the government’s way, asking whether the communication carried “a factual statement without legal force that could be useful to the decision-making of the recipient” and whether it “was for the purpose of aiding compliance with existing law.”

The findings concede the point: “not all government communication to a private speech platform is coercive.” The government does not need a license over Facebook to have leverage over it. It has Section 230 and it has the antitrust division.

Consider what that leverage produced in the summer of 2021. Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, ran a sustained campaign of emails and meetings aimed at Facebook’s moderation of COVID content.

The Fifth Circuit found he had demanded internal policy details at least twelve times, pressing the company on what content was being demoted, what interventions it was making, and what measurable impact any of it had.

He told the company the White House was “gravely concerned” that Facebook was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” accused it of running a “shell game,” and, when an answer was slow, wrote: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

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Nancy Pelosi Says She’s ‘Done’

Nancy Pelosi is “done,” ladies and gentlemen. No, she’s not dead—no one has dropped a house on her like they did her sister—she’s just “done” with whatever. It’s hard to tell because everything associated with Democrats is about as sincere as a “bless your heart” is in Georgia. Still, she’s done, she says, which we will get into in a second, but first let me say that I am glad she’s done with things because America needs to be done with her. Pelosis, like fish, begin to smell after three days.

Of course, it’s been longer than three days since Nancy D’Alesandro first inflicted herself on America—she’s been grifting us all since 1987. In that time, she has climbed the ladder of power faster than most people ever could. In fact, the only thing that has risen faster than her career is her net worth, which surely is just a coincidence because she swears she has never, and would never, use her position in Congress and leadership in the Democrat Party to enrich herself.

She, Nancy insists, has no interest in such things; she’s only interested in “serving” the country, especially the poor. It’s amazing how many leftists get rich “helping” the poor, isn’t it? I had no idea there was so much money in it. If people did, I bet many would have made different career choices.

But Nancy’s husband, Paul, has never been a “public servant”; he’s been trading stock with a success rate greater than someone with a time machine. Fear not, however, it’s all been on the up-and-up, as the two never speak about financial matters or pending government action or grants. Paul is just a really good guesser.

The Pelosis are so disinterested in money that they’ve been invited to participate in many initial public offerings from companies they don’t really have any connections to outside of her position in government. Surely you’ve had many, too, right?

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Four Republicans Vote AGAINST Codifying President Trump’s Executive Order Banning Transgender Service in the Military

Four Republicans just teamed up with Democrats to torpedo an amendment that would have locked in President Donald Trump’s critical Executive Order banning transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military.

The amendment, sponsored by fiery Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), aimed to codify Trump’s policy into law as part of the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

President Trump’s Executive Order rightly recognizes that military service demands the highest physical and mental standards, standards that biological reality and decades of data prove are incompatible with gender dysphoria and the radical “transitions” pushed by the left.

“Next to ensure that we have the most lethal fighting force in the world, we will get transgender ideology the hell out of our military. It’s going to be gone,” Trump announced last year.

“In addition, we will stop our service members from being indoctrinated with radical left ideologies such as critical race theory. We’re going to stop it. It’s already been stopped. It’s already been halted, totally halted.”

The amendment failed by a razor-thin 212-217 vote, with 210 Republicans supporting it and four Republicans voting against it, joining every voting Democrat in opposition.

The GOP lawmakers were Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), as well as the non-voting Republican delegates from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

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Smithsonian history museum director stumbles over basic questions on sex: ‘I’m not sure’

Smithsonian National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig appeared stumped by a basic question on sex and gender from Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C.

During a House hearing on alleged “extreme political activism” on display at the Smithsonian, Mace asked Hartig, “Do you believe that men can become women?”

Hartig hesitated before answering, “Ma’am, as the director of the museum, that’s not relevant in this case.”

“It’s very relevant,” Mace shot back. Motioning to images of Smithsonian displays featuring drag queens, Mace continued, “You’ve got men dressed up as women, and you have them on displays in front of kids. Do you think men can become women? Yes or no?”

Hartig did not answer the question but instead began to discuss one of the drag queen displays pictured on the board behind Mace. The congresswoman interrupted her.

“What is a woman, Dr. Hartig?” Mace demanded.

Hartig began to answer that “as a director and as a historian, it’s not my-” before Mace cut her off again, saying, “You sexualized the American History Museum. So, this is a fair question. What is a woman?”

Looking down for a moment, Hartig responded, “We strive to represent and not categorize all Americans.”

“OK, I have another question for you,” Mace continued. “There’s a glossary at the museum that informs visitors that while American culture traditionally recognizes two genders, other countries recognize three or more.”

“So, enlighten me this morning: how many genders are there?” Mace asked.

Hartig hesitated again before asking, “Ma’am, which glossary?”

“This is a display, and it has a glossary that says other countries recognize three or more genders. So, I would like you to enlighten me today; you’re the director of the American History Museum, who’s sexualized things in front of kids. I want to know, I want to ask you, how many genders are there?”

Finally, Hartig responded, “I’m not sure which glossary you’re speaking,” before adding, “I’m happy to get back to you about that glossary.”

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