Source: The American Prospect
by Russell Lemle & Jasper Craven
“If there’s one thing hedge fund titan Steven Cohen is known for, it’s rising from the ashes. A decade ago, Cohen worked feverishly to recover from a notorious Wall Street scandal. Now, he’s aiming to ram through a damaging veterans mental health bill that was summarily quashed in President Trump’s first term. One of the world’s richest people, Cohen suffered a devastating blow in 2013 when his hedge fund pleaded guilty to insider trading and paid $1.8 billion in fines, the largest such penalty in U.S. history. Cohen personally reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that banned him from managing outside money for two years. The SEC cited his ‘failure to supervise’ a portfolio manager involved in the scheme who went to prison for nine years. Following his mandatory hiatus, Cohen returned with a vengeance, swiftly doubling his fortune to $23 billion.” (01/12/25)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“From the colonial frontier to the battlefields of Gettysburg, war has been both a crucible and a mirror for the American experiment. Historians from Charles Tilly to Allan Millett have long emphasized the centrality of warfare in the formation of modern states, arguing that ‘war made the state and the state made war.’ Yet, in the American case, this process unfolded within a republican framework that ostensibly distrusted standing armies and centralized power. The tension between libertarian ideals and the exigencies of war defined the nation’s evolution from fragile confederation to continental empire.” (01/11/26)
“[W]e are less than two weeks into the new year, and what we have seen from a president and a Republican Party ostensibly put in control of the country to lower food prices and improve the lives of hardworking Americans is chaos and death. At his 2025 inauguration, Trump said: ‘Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.’ Bandying about like pirates snatching other nations’ oil and gunning down Americans in the streets doesn’t jibe with stopping wars or nurturing a new spirit of unity. … Even if you, for some reason, approve of a federal agent shooting multiple times into a vehicle while recording video on his cell phone, there should at least be some universal agreement that the Trump administration’s response to what happened in Minneapolis has been vile, inflammatory and sickeningly tribal.” (01/11/26)
“When government shoves its nose into markets, the supposed beneficiaries usually end up losing. Politically connected businesses pocket more money. Government bureaucrats enjoy more power. Everyone else pays through the nose. Politicians’ assertions of contrary motivation just add insult to injury.” (01/10/26)
“Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers Jan. 1 he would ‘replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ Luckily, psychiatrists have not yet classified ‘rugged individualism’ as a mental illness. But Mamdani’s vision of cozy collectivism is tricky to reconcile with what I saw in Communist Romania in November 1987. … In Romania, ‘warmth’ was an abstraction that existed primarily in propaganda campaigns exalting the supreme leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. To save energy to fulfill the Five-Year Plan for factories, the government routinely cut off the electricity to hospitals, causing 1,000 deaths the previous winter. The infant mortality rate was so high, the government refused to register children as being born until they survived their first month. On the streets …. People stopped me and pleaded for packs of Kent cigarettes — the de facto second currency — they could use to bribe doctors to get health care for their sick children.” (01/10/26)
“From a purely tactical standpoint, the operation was a textbook display of American might: fast, overwhelming, and successful, with U.S. forces in and out of Venezuela before most of the world had even processed what was happening. But almost immediately, that show of force collided with a harder reality at home: Only 1 in 3 Americans say they support it, an unusually low level of approval at the very outset of a U.S. military operation. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken January 4 to 5 found that just 33 percent approved of the U.S. removing Maduro, while 72 percent reported their concerns about the U.S. getting too involved in Venezuela. Support breaks sharply along party lines, with Republicans backing the operation at far higher rates than Democrats and independents. Historically, Americans have given new conflicts much more leeway. ” (01/10/26)
“‘[T]herefore you may rest assured that if the Nicaraguan activities were brought to light, they would furnish one of the largest scandals in the history of the country.’ Such was the concluding line of a letter from Marine Corps Sergeant Harry Boyle to Idaho Senator William Borah on April 23, 1930. Boyle’s warning was not merely an artifact of a bygone intervention, but a caution against imperial hubris — one newly relevant in the wake of ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’ in Venezuela. The Trump administration has amplified the afterglow of its tactical success with renewed assertions of hemispheric hegemony through a nostalgic and often ahistorical reading of the Monroe Doctrine. Despite the administration’s enthusiasm for old-fashioned hemispheric imperialism, the historical record ought to caution for restraint, not revisionism.” (01/09/26)
“Over the past year, several cities in the United States have erupted temporarily into war zones. Violence has broken out between immigration agents and those living in the country illegally [sic], or Americans hampering deportations. In recent days, a killing in Minneapolis and shootings in Oregon by federal agents have highlighted the potential for personal tragedy stemming from the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration laws as well as the street tactics opposing such law enforcement. Agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been connected to at least 14 shootings over the past 12 months. At the same time, the mental impact on these federal officers has also risen, perhaps causing many to be too quick to pull the trigger.” [editor’s note: ICE agents are free to give up the thug life and get real jobs if people’s natural reactions to murderous goons makes them feel unsafe – TLK] (01/09/25)
“Was the 2016 election a turning point for American democracy? Did political shenanigans and the election destroy so much credibility and legitimacy that the system will never fully recover? In 2016, ignorant voters were reviled like never before. However, the entire political-media system floundered badly. Never before had American voters been obliged to choose between two such widely despised candidates. A few months before the election, an Associated Press poll ‘found that 86 percent of Americans were angry or dissatisfied with the state of politics in the nation.’ Routine deceit by both candidates helped make ‘post-truth’ the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016.” (01/09/26)
“The claim that protectionism serves ‘higher ends’ rests on a confusion about both economics and the non-economic goals people actually value.” (01/09/26)
