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Lee Jae-myung, the candidate who just decisively won South Korea’s presidency, is not exactly Bernie Sanders. Nobody is. But within South Korea’s political landscape, Lee Jae-myung (LJM) is progressive and among the more populist elite politicians.
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Trump Casino: When Markets Become the House Game | |
In the war between Trump & Musk, I’m rooting for the bullets. However, the whole thing is (again) a distraction from the significant damage being levied on the country. It’s tempting to believe America will emerge from the Trump chaos unscathed. It won’t. | |
The defining features of this presidency are cruelty and chaos — but chaos with a purpose. Share prices plunge following tariff threats, only to rally when he backs down. The White House attempts to bar Harvard from enrolling international students, then gets blocked by the courts. Trump calls for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to be fired, then insists days later he has “no intention” of terminating him. Even if most of his promises go unfulfilled, the long-term damage will be severe. | |
TACO | |
If Trump were a poker player, he’d swagger to the table talking shit, go all in, then fold before his opponents respond. It’s easy to dismiss this behavior as crazy or incompetent. But it raises a troubling question: Is this a deliberate effort — straight out of an autocrat’s playbook — to create volatility that the autocrat and his acolytes can exploit? What if this isn’t incompetence, but a strategy. | |
Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined the perfect term: the TACO trade — Trump Always Chickens Out. But Armstrong told us on Prof G Markets that chaos may be the point: Trump and his team have such contempt for the system, they don’t see any downside risk in burning the village to save it. | |
These policy gyrations have created an association of “toxic uncertainty” with brand USA. Announcing more than 50 new or revised tariff policies in a matter of months makes no sense, until it does. Trump’s market manipulation operates like a carnival game — it’s rigged. The house always wins, as it knows when the music is about to stop. | |
The Numbers | |
Trump’s ability to trigger wild swings in stock prices has created an environment ripe for insider trading, undermining trust in U.S. markets and eroding a pillar of American prosperity — the rule of fair play. When Trump shocks the market and then retreats, it gives his inner circle, both in Washington and on Wall Street, an opportunity to place trades with asymmetric upside. They have information the other players (whether they’re buying or selling) don’t possess. | |
Trump’s tariff proclamations have created some of the most extreme market volatility in decades: | |
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Multi-trillion-dollar swings happening within hours of his statements aren’t market forces — they’re signs of manipulation with a presidential seal. The markets are essentially reacting in real time to his policy announcements and reversals, creating unprecedented uncertainty for investors … and opportunity for those who are inside. | |
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Inside Job | |
A string of incredibly prescient trades has sparked concern that Trump’s allies may be trading on material nonpublic information. ProPublica reported that more than a dozen high-ranking officials made well-timed trades following Trump’s inauguration — most selling stock before markets tanked. | |
Attorney General Pam Bondi sold $1 million to $5 million in Trump Media stock on April 2, the same day the president announced his Liberation Day tariffs. The timing of her trades that day is unclear. But think about that: The nation’s top cop is selling stocks the day an announcement by the president ignites a crash in prices. Trump Media slipped 13% in the following days, before recovering. | |
Wow. What. Luck. | |
Most damaging: On April 9, Trump posted a message to followers on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.” Less than four hours later, he announced a tariff pause, sending stocks soaring. Billionaires tracked by Bloomberg enjoyed their best day ever, adding more than $300 billion to their combined net worth. | |
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Maxine Waters, the California Democrat, zeroed in on suspicious call option trading in the 10 minutes before Trump’s announcement. “No rational investor would have purchased these options unless they had prior knowledge of the president’s impending reversal on tariff policy,” she and her House colleagues wrote in an April 10 letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins requesting an investigation. | |
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Damage Control | |
Less than two weeks later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at a closed-door investor summit hosted by JPMorgan Chase, said he expected a “de-escalation” in Trump’s trade war with China. Stocks, which had already started recovering after a sharp drop the previous day, soared after Bessent’s comments were reported. | |
Elizabeth Warren demanded an explanation. The Massachusetts senator argued in a letter to Bessent that Trump’s opaque tariff decisions and “frequent, seemingly random changes of course have created a scenario where wealthy investors and well-connected corporations can get special treatment, receiving inside information they can use to time the market, or obtaining tariff exemptions that are worth billions of dollars — while Main Street, small businesses, and America’s families are left to clean up the damage.” | |
In late May, stocks dropped again after Trump threatened to raise tariffs to 50% on goods from the EU. But when the president subsequently said those tariffs would be delayed until July, his comments triggered a global rally over the next two days. | |
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The White House has announced a flurry of new and revised tariff policies since Inauguration Day in January. But I’m willing to bet that very little will change over the next year or two when it comes to trade policy. I also predict that Trump will fail to follow through on most of his threats, on everything from tariffs to Harvard, as he backpedals or gets stymied by the courts. | |
Bad Cop | |
The country’s top securities cop will get to the bottom of it … at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But at a time when suspicious trading activity is mounting, the SEC is being defanged. Trump earlier this year signed an executive order to “rein in” independent regulators, including the SEC, and make them accountable to the administration. The order forces the agency to report to the White House for approval. | |
At the same time, thanks to buyout and retirement programs offered by the administration, the SEC workforce is being slashed. SEC divisions reportedly lost up to 19% of their staff over a period of just several weeks. The fox isn’t just in the henhouse — now he is the farmer. | |
And don’t expect a strongly worded letter from Senators Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren to light a fire under Atkins, the pro-business crypto enthusiast Trump picked to head the SEC. You can bet Atkins will take a lighter regulatory approach than his predecessor, Gary Gensler. | |
Golden Age of Insider Trading | |
Insider trading has long been a scourge. James B. Stewart chronicled the 1980s insider trading scandals in his book Den of Thieves. Sheelah Kolhatkar’s 2017 book, Black Edge, tells the story of billionaire hedge fund investor Steven A. Cohen, his former firm, SAC Capital Advisors, and the largest insider trading investigation in history. SAC pleaded guilty in 2013 to fraud charges and agreed to pay a record $1.2 billion penalty. While Cohen wasn’t charged, he agreed to a two-year ban on managing outside money. In 2014, his firm was reborn as Point72. Six years later, he bought the New York Mets. | |
But the conditions today threaten to usher in a golden age of insider trading, inviting well-connected investors to cheat. I predict that the next set of results from the nation’s hedge fund managers will show that some of them have made a killing, raising questions about whether they’ve capitalized on insider information to achieve those gains. | |
The Real Cost | |
The collateral damage happens to the people on the other side of these trades. They are losing fortunes. As Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum argues, American policy is “being transformed, not to benefit Americans but to benefit the president, his family, and his friends.” | |
In our conversation last month, she said that fighting corruption depends on connecting it to ordinary people’s lives, showing “they are poor because the Trump family is rich.” She noted that Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who stood up to Putin and died in a remote prison above the Arctic Circle, successfully linked Russia’s kleptocracy to bad roads and poor healthcare. | |
Ensuring America has a fair playing field is key to its success — that’s why we have five times Europe’s risk capital for startups. It’s why our companies garner $26 in value for every $1 dollar in profit. Russia is a kleptocracy. The total value of its stock market is around $80b, vs. $52t for the U.S. The erosion of faith has disastrous consequences. Corruption is contagious. It starts with one infected trade, spreads to cabinet members, then metastasizes through Congress and the donor class. America under Trump hasn’t just caught the disease — it’s becoming a superspreader event that will infect global capitalism. | |
Mean girls breaking up makes for good reality TV, but it’s a misdirect from the grift that will reduce our prosperity and limit our ability to protect others at home and abroad. | |
Life is so rich, | |
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¹ So the comparison is not unreasonable.
ICE Now Expanding into Local Law Enforcement As Spearhead of Trump Repression.
"Operation At Large" looks to boost thousands of daily arrests
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June 4, 2025
By Marc Cooper
The Coop Scoop by Marc Cooper is a reader-supported publication of opposition. To support and join this work consider becoming a paid subscriber.
SubscribedTrump’s violent ICE agency is about to escalate its war against any or all “illegals” in a dramatic fashion while engaging local law enforcement in its repression. And this should come as no surprise to us.
Every authoritarian regime in recent history has formed its own elite corps of feared special police and/or military units to suppress dissent and act as the spearhead of state repression.
The Revolutionary Guard and the Morality Police in Iran. The GRU and the Spetsnaz in Russia. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. The GOPE in Mexico. DINA in Chile. The AAA and the Federal Police during the Argentine dictatorship were inseparable from the horrific death squads. And, of course, the SS in Nazi Germany.
All these elite special forces had or have one thing in common – though they were created as relatively small special elites under the command of the central state, they eventually and progressively grew to influence and even dominate the broader, more common local law enforcement units.
The SS is the most singular example of this. Originally a small corps described as Hitler’s bodyguards, the black-uniformed agents came to control all law enforcement in Germany and even expanded into fully formed fighting units inside the German Army.
No, I am not about to declare that Donald Trump’s ICE are the new SS – not yet. But its heavily armed unaccountable tactical units are unquestionably starting down this same path and are becoming Trump’s special hammer in his domestic repression campaign.
And the anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner crusade is becoming the central prong in Trump’s power base as his economic policies flounder and his popular support weakens. A weaker Trump is more likely to ratchet up his repression rather than begin to back down. The most violent dictators, especially rock stupid ones like Trump, are never wildly popular and they all eventually wind up clinging to power through intimidation, fear and violence.
As Trump loses popularity, and as his garbage-ridden domestic policies continue to falter in confrontations with the courts and public opinion, his grip on Federal power and on myriad civil institutions has only tightened. Be it within the Justice and State Departments, the DHS and the FBI, he now has total personal dominance.
And out in front of this parade now marches the shock troops of ICE. And it’s going to get worse.
We have all seen the video clips of machine gun-toting masked agents in full tactical gear swarming completely harmless suspected “illegals” and foreign students as if they were engaging the SS itself. But how many of these detentions have not been video-taped? ICE has become one of the least transparent agencies in the Trump regime. When its street agents are masked and wearing no badges or ID, what sort of accountability can we expect from their superiors?
ICE has ceased posting daily arrest counts but on social media it claims about 350 arrests between May 26 and June 2, eons away from the White House goal.
Those numbers are likely to zoom upward as ICE is opening a new repressive front.
NBC News has broken an exclusive story on Wednesday, detailing how under pressure from the White House, ICE has incorporated some 5,000 officers from other agencies and 21,000 National Guard to undertake the massive “Operation At Large” already underway.
This comes on the heels of Deputy Chief of Staff, and top Trump toadie Stephen Miller chewing out senior ICE officials that if they did not meet certain detention quotas they would be fired. Miller is demanding at least 3,000 detentions per day, more as much as ten times of more the current level.
Some officials from these other agencies are privately complaining that their being swept into the ICE campaign is preventing them from working on other more important criminal activities traditionally in their purview.
Like the crazed Air Force general in Catch-22 who was only interested in the symmetry of post-op bombing patterns and photos, Miller is focused only on the ICE arrest body count, no matter how strategic or how pointless the arrests are. So much for “getting the worst of the worst.” It’s now grab anyone you can.
Operation At Large, according to NBC, is a sprawling multi-agency push concentrating enormous power in the masked rangers of ICE and boosting the arrest count.
“The plan calls for using 3,000 ICE agents, including 1,800 from Homeland Security Investigations, which generally investigates transnational crimes and is not typically involved in arresting noncriminal immigrants; 2,000 Justice Department employees from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration; and 500 employees from Customs and Border Protection. It also includes 250 IRS agents, some of whom may be used to provide information on the whereabouts of immigrants using tax information, while others would have the authority to make arrests, according to the operation plan.
The Department of Homeland Security has also requested the use of 21,000 National Guard members to provide support in ICE operations, according to two additional sources familiar with the request, though that number has yet to be approved by the Defense Department or by governors who would be deploying their state’s units, multiple sources cautioned.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, responding to the Miller meeting, said, “Keeping President Trump’s promise to deport illegal aliens is something the Administration takes seriously. We are committed to aggressively and efficiently removing illegal aliens from the United States, and ensuring our law enforcement officers have the resources necessary to do so. The safety of the American people depends upon it.”
Immigration status has now become Priority One in vast swaths of daily law enforcement agencies as their work is being progressively folded into ICE campaigns. FBI agents who should be investigating white collar crime and domestic terrorism are being taken off routine and forced to accompany ICE agents on their field raids, adding nothing to the enforcement process except for a greater factor of intimidation.
U.S. Attorneys are also escalating charges against those detained and misdemeanor immigration violations are now flooding federal courts who have more important things to do.
“And prosecutors say cases without immigration components have stalled or are moving more slowly, according to documents seen by NBC News and conversations with six current and former prosecutors and a senior FBI official, who described how immigration is now a central part of discussions around whether to pursue cases.”
Other reports in the last few days say that Miller has told ICE that it need not worry about warrants in detaining immigrants and that arrests of so-called “collaterals” be encouraged. A collateral is an individual found in a place where ICE has a warrant for somebody else who is not there but the collateral is also undocumented and should be arrested.
No need, however, for ICE to bump into them. They are actively seeking them out by raiding the street corners around Home Depots and similar outlets where immigrants congregate looking for day jobs. Restaurant raids are also taking place, further underlining the falsehood that ICE is searching only for the worst of the worst.
Only last Friday, a squad of fully armed and masked ICE agents were met with a community uproar when they swarmed without warning a popular San Diego Italian restaurant. Witnesses say that initially ICE operatives, dressed in full battle attire, handcuffed the whole restaurant staff as they checked IDs. Of course, there is no word on how many were arrested.
As the heavy-duty raid drew neighborhood attention, locals came outdoors to protest in the faces of the ICE agents, yelling they were “fascists.” When one protester tried to block an ICE vehicle, the agents responded with smoke bombs and flash stun grenades.
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This is but prelude to what is coming. And it certainly occurs to me that Trump opponents and human rights defenders should now begin targeting ICE with non-violent passive resistance. ICE is now a much more dangerous and worthy target than Tesla dealerships, given Musk’s waning influence in the administration – to put it politely.
ICE is the cutting edge now of the Trump Show. And while I might be wrong, it just might make the most political impact if it is focused on. Medicare cuts are pernicious and inhumane and must be opposed, but they cannot be seen or felt unless you are one of the victims.
Just like the televised murder of George Floyd had a much more galvanizing political effect than abstract slogans about White Privilege, the deployment of military force by masked operatives dragging away local service workers could possibly be one of the best ways to expose the immorality of the Trump gangster regime. Nobody, except the Truly Lost, are comfortable with armed troops violently snatching peaceful immigrants from our midst. Remember that immigration violations are a civil, not a criminal issue. And in the case of the San Diego restaurant, if there were suspicions of undocumented workers, it could have been handled by one or two civilian-dressed agents meeting privately with the owners to review employment records. Not that I think is a great idea either, but more humane then the militarized raid that too place.
Not de-escalating is no oversight. The use of brute force is intentional. The xenophobes and fascists who surround Trump know very well they will never be able to arrest or deport more than a tiny fraction of the millions of undocumented. They prefer high-profile intimidating militarized operations to primarily instill fear and then hope for “self-deportation.” And just as importantly, to at least create the impression of Trump keeping his mass deportation to the hard-core MAGA base, especially to those knuckle heads who have bough his lies that we are suffering a violent invasion by gardeners, dishwashers, maids and nannies.
In the weeks between the November election and the January inauguration of Trump, I heard a lot of well-meaning but naïve liberals saying we had to “offer help” to those unfortunates who will be arrested. A twinge of noblesse oblige ran through these convos.
That time, my friends, is over. It’s time to put your ass on the line and offer resistance to the fascist vanguard that ICE has become. It’s time for a national information campaign against ICE and for those physically able to come up with strategies to non-violently confront these jack-booted tin soldiers in their street operations. Neighborhood and workplace networks must be built and trained and ready to immediately respond to any ICE incursion. The demand to disband ICE must rise to the top of our wish list.
Might this entail some danger and sacrifice? You bet it will! Avoiding confrontation and repudiation of ICE at every level disqualifies you as an oppositionist. But fascist forces are never defeated with just slogans and thoughts and prayers. Time to get real. +++
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Update (6/8/2025)     After our team released this, President Trump authorized the deployment of the National Guard as noted earlier to counter protests in Los Angeles and surrounding communities in the aftermath of ICE Raids and as in the Russia/Ukraine War, Russia launched its' biggest assault for what the Economist of London noted to be its' "last great push":   |
