A New Report On Revolving Door Corruption that Helps Make Sense of the Latest Twin Metals Lobbying Disclosures

Lobbying activity for the Twin Metals copper and nickel mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters increased dramatically in the second quarter of 2026. The new lobbying disclosure is here. In Q1 2026, the Bernhardt Group reported Twin Metals income of $120,000; in Q2, $220,000. Bernhardt lobbied both houses of Congress and multiple executive branch agencies on “mine leasing issues” on behalf of the Chilean company that owns Twin Metals.

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Another Look at the Revised Schedule of Trump’s Intel Trades

The Wall Street Journal last week reported on "Trump's trading surges around major policy decisions," most notably around his Liberation Day tariffs and the pause on tariffs he announced one week later. It was, essentially, a bear raid conducted across the board and under cover of US trade policy. The Intel trades I’ve been looking at work in roughly the same way, clustering around closed-door discussions with Intel and major, market-moving announcements. 

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A Revised Schedule of Trump’s Intel Trades

The financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics on Monday affords another look at Trump's Intel trades. The trades were made from eight accounts controlled by the president. For now, I've listed them on this schedule, which runs chronologically from January 2025 to March 2026. There is lots to digest here, and lots of agita to go along with it, but for the moment I want to call out just one date on the schedule: 18 August, 2025.

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An Incomplete Look at Cantor Fitzgerald’s Rigetti Trades and Some Reconsideration of the Commerce-Cantor Connection 

Right around the time Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was taking a 10 percent equity stake in Intel for the US government, Cantor Fitzgerald —the firm Lutnick ran for 34 years, and which is now run by his sons — was building an enormous position in the chipmaker. That much is clear from the SEC filings I discussed in a previous post…

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San Francisco Street Photographs, Late 1980s

These photographs are from several rolls of black and white 35mm film I shot on the San Francisco streets in the late 1980s. (I think they were shot with the Pentax I owned back then. Someone stole it from a rental car in the mid-90s). I moved these rolls of film around the country, from San Francisco to Boston, Boston to New York City, New York City to San Francisco, then back to New York City.

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Cantor Fitzgerald Built an Enormous Position in Intel While Howard Lutnick Negotiated the Government’s 10 Percent Stake (And Trump Got Some, Too)

Trump bought Intel shares on six separate occasions in March of 2026, just before Intel’s market-moving announcement on 1 April that it had repurchased Apollo Global’s 49 percent share in an Irish joint venture, known as the Ireland SCIP. This much is clear from the timeline of Trump’s Intel trades I put together earlier this week. (Read that post for background.) In the short space of a month, Trump's March trades nearly tripled in value.

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A Timeline of Trump’s Intel Trades

Here’s a timeline that plots Trump’s Intel trades against Intel’s stock price. I’ve included a few major policy changes and announcements. It’s a rough sketch that tri…

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A Timeline of Trump’s Intel Trades

Here's a timeline that plots Trump's Intel trades against Intel's stock price. I've included a few major policy changes and announcements. It's a rough sketch that tries to put the Intel trades in context. Maybe others will find it useful. Trump boasted in January of this year that he had made "tens of billions of dollars for the American people" in the four months after he converted Intel's Biden CHIPS Act grant to an equity stake.

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Is the Iran War the Greatest Strategic Defeat in American History?

There's a new poll out today showing that "Trump's war in Iran" -- and it is his war, let's make no mistake about that -- "is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s." I am not much of a poll tracker. But the Washington Post story about this new polling caught my eye, not only because I've been watching Emile de Antonio's excellent 1968 Vietnam War film…

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A Reminder that Antofagasta’s Copper and Nickel Mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters is a Coordinated Political Project

In my most recent post about the Senate vote to overturn the Rainy River Watershed Mineral Withdrawal, I made the simple point (for what seems the umpteenth time, forgive me) that this latest bid to hand over the Boundary Waters to a foreign mining company is part of a coordinated political project, one that stretches back to Trump's first term and with connections to Project 2025.

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The Senate Vote on HJR 140 Is Not a Green Light to Mine Near the Boundary Waters, and There are Ways to Remedy the Harm Done

Two days before the Senate voted last week to overturn the 20-year Rainy River Watershed Withdrawal, I sent this letter to the Globe and Mail: Nathan Vanderklippe’s reporting on the effort to undo …

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Another delay in the Boundary Waters litigation will open the door to even more political finagling

No one should be surprised by the Joint Status Report just filed in the Boundary Waters litigation before the DC District Court of Appeals. Twin Metals, joined by the federal government, has asked for yet another 180-day abeyance. The mining company clearly sees that it has little chance of succeeding at law, so it has joined forces with the federal government, the putative defendant in this case, to keep the Twin Metals project on…

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Anti-War or Anti-Trump?

You can be anti-Trump but still pro-war. Among Trump’s political opponents are those who criticize his execution of the Iran war, but don’t oppose waging war against Iran per se, or those who disapprove of the way he went about things in Venezuela, “but,” or those who decry his belligerence over Greenland, not because it is a belligerent resource-grab but on the grounds that it alienates NATO allies.

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Atomos, Firmware, and Fraud

A reasonable person would conclude, after looking at this Sony FX3A page on the Atomos site and reading the word "Yes," that the "Touch to Focus" function on the Shinobi II monitor works with the Sony FX3A camera. And a reasonable person might then rely on that "Yes," that affirmation, that assurance by the manufacturer, to make a decision. A reasonable person might decide, say, to purchase a Shinobi II monitor in order to take advantage of its Touch to Focus feature.

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The Chilean billionaire who wants to mine copper and nickel near the Boundary Waters can’t even be bothered to pay his DC sewer bill?

Kalorama Sewer_ 2025115942Download Law professor and ethics watchdog Richard Painter put it bluntly back in 2019: Jared and Ivanka’s landlord — a billionaire from Chile who rents them their mansion…

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The Chilean billionaire who wants to mine copper and nickel near the Boundary Waters can’t even be bothered to pay his DC sewer bill?

Kalorama Sewer_ 2025115942Download Law professor and ethics watchdog Richard Painter put it bluntly back in 2019: Jared and Ivanka’s landlord — a billionaire from Chile who rents them their mansion…

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The Chilean billionaire who wants to mine copper and nickel near the Boundary Waters can’t even be bothered to pay his DC sewer bill?

Kalorama Sewer_ 2025115942Download Law professor and ethics watchdog Richard Painter put it bluntly back in 2019: Jared and Ivanka’s landlord — a billionaire from Chile who rents them their mansion in D.C. — will use the Boundary Waters as his toilet. Pro-sulfide mining politicians in Minnesota and Washington are handing him the washroom key. Seven years later, the key to the billionaire’s commode is now turning in the lock.

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Hitchhiking As A Type of Women’s Emancipation in the Early Thirties

This scene from director Mervyn LeRoy's 1934 Heat Lightning brings me back to the observation that American women in the 1920s and 30s pioneered and popularized the practice of hitchhiking. Women like Doris Poggendee and Nettie Matthews, Barbara Starke, Nancy Youse, Betty Simpson, the McManus Sisters, or Allen Ginsburg’s mother Naomi – all could have been models from which these two characters were drawn. 

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What Happens to the Appeal in Twin Metals v. US if the Senate Passes HJR 140?

Forbes Magazine has excerpted and posted the same moment from the Rules Committee hearing on House Joint Resolution 140 that I did the other day: Pete Stauber's embarrassing concession that he brings HJR 140 on behalf of a Chilean conglomerate, a foreign company that will ship Minnesota's ore to China for processing. This was just minutes after the congressman gravely warned that "China, our adversary," has “stranglehold” over critical and rare earth minerals.

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Antofagasta’s Lobbyists Deliver “An Outrageous Abuse” of the Congressional Review Act

It’s a little hard to sit through the video of yesterday’s Rules Committee hearing on House Joint Resolution 140, but it's worth it just to see Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez coax Pete Stauber to acknowledge that any copper Antofagasta pulls out of the ground in northern Minnesota is going to end up “on a boat, in China.” So I excerpted that moment, above.

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If We’re Talking about the Violent Occupation and Colonization of Minnesota, Let’s Also Talk about the Play for Minnesota’s Critical Minerals

The ever-prolific docket watcher and political commentator Marci Wheeler put up a video the other day where, in her words, she "laid out how Trump's invasion of Venezuela is like his invasion of Minnesota: Tribute and obeisance." I have been wanting to draw and explore that same analogy, but I am reluctant to paint with the broad brush Wheeler uses here.

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François Moutin, 8 Jan 26

François Moutin with the Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio last night at Jazz Genius. (The trio plays tonight and tomorrow night as well.) Sony A7iii. 85mm 1.8.

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Goddard and Newman On Resource-Hoarding Hyper-Elites

Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman urge us to take off our "Westphalian blinders" if we are to make sense of the bullying, extortion, and belligerence that now passes for US foreign policy. Their paper on "neo-royalist cliques" addresses a theme I've discussed from time to time on this blog: "a return to the 'patrimonial' state, with rational-legal bureaucracies displaced by personalized rule and 'extra-legal' sovereignty." …

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Chasing Returns Leaves a Big Carbon Footprint

This chart is from the World Inequality Report 2026, published this week by the World Inequality Lab. The authors explain: Most emission estimates traditionally attribute greenhouse gases to the final consumers of goods and services. This “consumption-based” approach highlights differences in lifestyle and consumption patterns. However, it overlooks another critical dimension of responsibility: capital ownership. Focusing on ownership highlights investor agency:

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The crackpot king loses his bid to shut down offshore wind

Back in January, I wondered whether wind investors had standing to sue the Trump administration over the inauguration day memorandum suspending all federal approvals for offshore wind projects. It turns out the answer is yes, but the investors I had in mind -- individual and big name institutional investors -- are not the stakeholders who prevailed at the Massachusetts District Court yesterday in…

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A Second Adjournment Vibe Check on QQQ

The Invesco QQQ shareholder meeting has been adjourned for a second time, because the company once again failed to muster the votes they need for their UIT-ETF conversion scheme. Invesco came awfully close on this round, with "over 50% of shares" voting with management and for the conversion. That leaves them with less than one point to gain by December 19th, when the shareholder meeting is expected to resume.

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The Center for Biological Diversity Claps Back at House Republicans

With blatant disregard for First Amendment protections, Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee are now conducting sham investigations into civil society groups who "oppose mining in Northern Minnesota and otherwise negatively influence America’s natural resource and energy priorities." A December 1 letter from representatives Bruce Westerman (R-Ark), Pete Stauber (R-MN), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) accuses the Center for Biological Diversity, the Wilderness Society, Earthjustice, "and other similar radical groups" of "collusion" with "the Biden administration" and makes not-so-veiled threats about the groups' tax-exempt status.

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A Global Politics That Will Finally Save the World?

All of us must do our part and subject world leaders to extreme and relentless public pressure. The challenge of stranding potentially trillions of dollars in fossil capital and rebuilding the world is enormous. Of course, global leaders and officials will take the easier, cowardly road if they can get away with it. As we cross the 1.5C threshold into uncharted climatic territory, …

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