The Trump indictment; RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign; the eurodollar and the world's reseve currency; the war on crypto as a step toward introducing CBDCs

Another interesting and long (about 2-1/4 hours) conversation between the Duran and Robert Barnes that was livestreamed in early April. The main topics of discussion are shown in the title, with approximate timestamps as follows:

• Trump indictment starts the discussion

• discussion about RFK Jr. starts about 1:10

• discussion of Jeff Snider's theory about the eurodollar being the true world reserve currency starts a little before 1:33

• the war on crypto as part of a plan to introduce CBDCs starts a little before 1:54

Trump indictment

Alexander said, I read this indictment and thought, this teminds me of student jokes of the type law students used to come up with in my day. How can you prosecute the same thing 34 times? (He says later that this if referred to as "stacking" and in Britain the Crown prosecution agency has clear guidelines that you don't do it). And I can't see what the crime being alleged is. As far as I can see the crime is treating something as a legal expense instead of a business expense. And it's being done in a way that's supposed to get around the statute of limitations issue, and trying to litigate something, a federal offense, that this court and this prosecutor doesn't actually have any jurisdiction over. We're told they can do this because of its connection to some dark and terrible crime but we're never told what it is.

Barnes details how incredibly weak the grounds for indictment are, noting that attorneys like Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley, both Democrats, have made the same case. Even John Bolton, who hates Trump, almost broke down crying on CNN according to Barnes, saying in effect, "this was supposed to be a good indictment, it will probably make him stronger, it will probably be dismissed." And in the court of public opinion almost a majority of Democrats said it was a political indictment, not a legal indictment, which shows how bad a position they're in.

Trump has undergone a macroscopic, microscopic inquiry by every political legal authority known to man - Mueller, the Southern District of NY, the state of NY, the NYC district attorney, the US DOJ continues to do it. And all they come up with is that the Trump organization within its ledger in 2017 said they paid Michael Cohen for legal services for a certain amount of money, and that's what's being called a big crime. This ledger was an internal document, it wasn't shared externally; it wasn't part of an audit, or a summation to the government or on the SEC (FEC?) - nothing public, this was something on their internal book ledger. They can't find another instance in the history of NY or anywhere in the US where anyone has been prosecuted on these grounds.

The crime he's been charged with is intent to defraud which is a misdemeanor but they've elevated it to a felony on the grounds that it was rooted in an intent to violate federal election law. Barnes details on why the whole thing is ludicrous; that they'll have to prove he latter to prove the former, and to do that they will have to prove "willfulness" on his part. Dershowitz called it the weakest indictment he's ever seen, Turley said 34 times 0 still equals 0 (referencing the fact that the prosecutor listed 34 instances of the same alleged crime).

Barnes discusses a number of elements of the indictment process that can be challenged on Constitutional grounds like selective prosecution. According to Barnes, here you have the prosecutor admitting when he campaigned he was out to get Trump - before he knew anything about any case. The NY AG did the same. Democrats have been doing the same across the country. Many of his associates at the NY DA's office did the same. This was the NY DA's office that was made famous as the peak in prosecutorial integrity by shows like Law and Order that are based on the famous Robert Morgenthau who long ran that office. We're a long ways away from those days. This is someone whose wife was bragging to everyone that her husband was going to "get Trump." There is no more compelling case of impermissible selective prosecution than this one and if it's not enforced here then it's just dead letter law in America.

Another possible challenge on Constitutional grounds is that the prosecutor likely lied to the Grand Jury about the nature of NY law, which is evident by the fact the Grand Jury didn't even decide what crime he committed to elevate the alleged misdemeanor crime to a felony. An honest judge would have dismissed the case as soon as he saw the indictment, told the prosecutor it was insufficient and told him to go back to the GJ and get a different one.

Another possible Constitutional challenge is that you can't suborn testimony or put perjured testimony and it's almost a guarantee they did it with Michael Cohen. Because Cohen has contradicted himself on this issue publicly for years.

There are numerous ethics violations, some of which rise to Constitutional violations. For example, you're not supposed to have any decision-making role in a case where your impartiality can merely be questioned - it's not whether you think you're impartial, it's whether the world would agree that you are. On those grounds he should have disqualified most of the prosecutors in his office from any further inquiry or investigation and assigned someone who was an indisputably impartial to be involved. The prosecutor also made statements declaring that Trump was guilty, which you can't do in America, that's an egregious violation. You have to say, "the indictment alleges...but he's innocent until proven guilty." So this prosecutor has violated almost every ethical rule you can.

So Trump has grounds to move to remove the prosecutor and to disqualify the judge (whose daughter was one of Kamala Harris's key campaign people); even before, he has grounds to stay the proceedings pending the election so this case does not injudiciously interfere with the election - they're planning on the trial taking place during primary season.

The FEC looked at this and said there was no campaign law violation. Then the Southern District of NY looked at it - they hated Trump, they were going after Cohen to try and get Trump but as you noted they admitted in the indictment, Cohen's biggest crime was lying about how tied to Trump he was. Robert Mueller et al couldn't find a crime to indict Trump with.

If they bring a case on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents they have a bigger problem because if you're going to prosecute Trump, who as president had the authority to declassify documents, you have to do it to Biden who removed classified documents both when he was a Senator and when he was VP.

Barnes says the white pill in all this is that for those of us who have been representing outsiders and dissidents for decades, and for our predecessors that have gone through it, the political weaponization of our law enforcement has always been there but the ordinary American didn't see it. What they're seeing with Trump is the corruption of the Deep State being exposed.

Some other interesting tidbits:

Alexander read the indictment of Michael Cohen when he was prosecuted in 2018; it was a federal prosecution, he thinks it was through the Southern District of NY. The first thing it said is that Cohen massively exaggerated his connections and importance to Trump. The second thing it said is that he insinuated himself into Trump's favor by presenting himself as an effective fixer. The third thing it said is one of the reasons Cohen did that was in the hope that if Trump got elected, Cohen would get a job in the Trump administration. He was utterly furious when that didn't happen because Trump didn't take him seriously.

Stormy Daniels has been ordered by the federal courts to pay close to half a million dollars to Trump for bringing a bogus claim against him. She's publicly admitted she never had an affair with Trump.

RFK Jr.

Barnes considers him the best candidate to run on the Democratic side since his father in 1968. He says, "Full disclosure: I've told him and the people around him that I'd be happy to help out his campaign because I believe in it. I was a big fan of his father, as a kid I carried two books around after my own father passed away - one was RFK (Sr.)'s To Seek a Newer World, a great campaign text, I recommend it to people to see what a different kind of Democratic Party could have looked like."

Barnes says he sees this as a 3-fold issue. One, why is he running? Two, how will he campaign? And three, can it be effective? The "why" relates to his father and uncle as he sees their legacy. He's the oldest Kennedy kid, the only one who really has memory of JFK's presidency and his father's candidacy on a deep level. He was 14 when his father was assassinated, an older child when JFK was assassinated; there's pictures of him in the WH running around with his cousins. John Jr of course died some years ago, right around the time he was thinking of running for the Senate in NY - his plane goes down and he dies. Who became Senator from NY that same cycle? I'll let folks look it up at home (Chuck Schumer). It's a sort of death curse that follows certain people.

Whenever RFK Jr has thought about running before they've unleashed attacks on him. So he goes into the DA's office in NY and suddenly they find heroin on him on a plane that derails his political career. Then he talks about running years later for the US Senate and all of a sudden a private diary gets leaked to embarrass and attack him in a very nasty way. People get confused because the rest of the Kennedy family is mostly political establishment. RFK Jr never has been. He's always been a dissident. He's been an environmental lawyer, what I call a local environmental lawyer. Now he believes in a lot of the global climate change policies that I'm not a fan of and don't believe in some of the underlying theories that he does. But if you look at his legal career, it's been about protecting local waterways and air and ground and farms, the right of you as an ordinary person to not have crap in your backyard, more of the populist side of environmental law. Then about a decade ago he got into questioning Big Pharma and the vaccine movement and vaccines - whether they were impregnable from questions and skepticism as the political establishment would have you believe. He then wrote a book I think in 2015 about his whole family, American Values, in which he laid out what he believed about his father and uncle and this is important to why he is running. He believes and said at a conference recently, "my family has been waging a war with the Deep State for 60 years."

RFK Jr has neither forgotten nor forgiven what the Deep State did to his father and uncle. And he's partially running as payback, and he's also running because he believes that the Deep State has so corrosively corrupted American Constitutional democracy that it no longer even functions, and he wants a public platform to talk about all these issues. He believes not only that the road not taken with JFK and RFK's deaths diverted America on a perilous path from which it has not recovered and from which it's suffered serious detriment, but that it is now on that path to its own peril and to the world's peril, that WW3 and global catastrophe is a realistic risk.

He saw what the DS could do on a global scale using a pandemic as its pretext; he sees CBDCs, he sees lockdowns, mass house arrests, medical invasion, forced medical experimentation, he sees all of this as the most perilous path to totalitarian government in American history. So he believes he HAS to run in order to contest those issues and at least present an option.

Barnes talked a good bit about RFK Sr.'s campaign, how it was the consensus view that it would be a complete disaster. Then he won California on the backs of a coalition of working class whites, blacks and Mexican-Americans - BTW George Wallace's voters, their second favorite candidate in 1968 was RFK. That shows the power and potency and cross-party appeal of RFK. And RFK Jr. is almost a spitting image of his father in terms of style and substance and personality and belief structure.

Can he win? From a democratic electorate perspective: Richard Farris, the People's Pundit, recently did a poll and he put everybody in. The hardcore base of RFK is something like 3%, with Biden around 30-35% - that's if all 12 candidates ran. It would be a different animal if it was just him against Biden because he can inherit a lot of the anti-Biden protest vote. His core base is his father's base - working class, boomer generation, elderly white voters with some black and Mexican-American voters.

He's right now in the polls where his father started out in 1968. It's also where Bernie Sanders started out in 2016. Those campaigns should tell you that if you have the right campaign platform, the right personal projection, you absolutely can compete, especially against a dolt like Biden.

The Democratic political machine was nowhere near as strong in 1968 as it is today. But they thought his father would lose; two weeks before he won California they thought he would lose there by double digits, instead he WON California by double digits and he won because of massive support from all the working class voters.

The eurodollar and the world's reserve currency

Barnes introduces this by saying, I've been fascinated by this (theory by Jeff Snider, more on that below) because it's a perspective that's revolutioninzed my own theories and thought and filter and framework for understanding the dollar because there's a lot of contradictions out there.

If the US dollar being issued by the Fed is actually the reserve currency, that should require we have a balance of payments deficit, should require we have a trade deficit that should make the dollar almost constantly strong, that's kind of the side effect of all that. Yet a lot of that was not happening.

On the flip side, if the Fed really controlled the dollar - even going back to the 80s with the Latin American sovereign debt crisis, the Asian Tigers in the 90s and our own global financial crisis and the PIIGS crisis in Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) - a lot of this shouldn't have happened in ways that did happen, apparently to their shock and surprise.

What's interesting is this theory being proposed by Jeff Snider ("Chief Strategist for Atlas Financial and co-host of the popular Eurodollar University podcast") that the Fed-issued US dollar is not actually the world's reserve currency, that instead something loosely called the "eurodollar system" is.

[for more on what the eurodollar is, see the "The eurodollar and shadow banking" portion of the discussion between Robert Barnes and the Rebel Capitalist here].

It's a bit of a misnomer because it's not the euro and it's not European use of the dollar, that was the origin of the term but not what it currently means. Basically what Snider suggests is that beginning in the 1950s, private banks around the globe issued their own currency and called it the US dollar but that these are not dollars that were ever printed by the Federal Reserve or ever originated from the US, and that the US political class has often struggled to understand. You can see this in internal notes by the Fed and various policies.

That the US dollar was the reserve currency, backed by gold and then by oil is mostly mythology under his theory. His theory is that effectively private banks around the globe hijacked and now control the monetary system. And that the US went along with it when it realized in the 70s and 80s what was happening because it solved Triffin's Dilemma for them because private banks were issuing their own currency denominated in dollars but not coming from the US dollar base itself.

He explains Triffin's Dilemma this way: the problem with your currency being the global currency is that it can conflict with domestic economic interests. For example, what if you want to protect your own domestic manufacturing like China does. The problem with making your currency the global currency is that YOUR goods can suddenly become more expensive than THEIR goods in your own market and you lose that mercantile edge that could hollow out your manufacturing base, as it did to the UK after their reserve currency was replaced by the US and as happened in the US after it shipped its manufacturing sourcing from the US to the global south and especially China.

And that was fine while it provided global liquidity and made it asy for US and Western corporations to do business in foreign places and resource their labor from Europe and the US to the global south. But it became a problem when for any reason they got nervous and people didn't trust each other because it's a very opaque system, it's a bank-privileged system, it's a black box system. So we often have no ideawhat's really going on, even the central banks don't fully know what's going on. The consequence of which is that if confidence in the system collapses at any point, the engine stalls or completely stops. To a certain degree that's what happened in August 2007. And since then they've really atrophied and clotted up, we've had a constant global dollar shortage problem that sporadically perks up. So sometimes it may show up in a European sovereign debt crisis as in 2009 and 2010. It's never been fully explained politically as to how that happened.

Jeff Snider's eurodollar explanation is that this is an out of control banking system being privileged by global private banks and financial institutions that since August 2007 don't fully trust each other enough so they require more and more pristine collateral, they shrunk the growth rate of their balance sheet, and the consequence is a global stalling in economic development. The repo market and the derivatives market rise with world GDP from 2000 to 2008; then the repo market kind of flatlined, derivatives kind of flatlined, but not world GDP. How did they replace it? Debt.

We've had debts explode among governments all around the world - not in Russia BTW, they're the only exception to all this in many respects, only one that's meaningfully divorced from the dollar in reserve terms and domestic economy terms; Putin doesn't care what the ruble exchange rate is because very little of their economy is dependent on imported goods in other currencies, in fact a lower ruble can make Russian products more competitive around the world in external markets. He's the guy who's running balanced budgets, not running up massive deficits; he's been decreasing their debt, not increasing it. But he's an exception; everyone else has debt through the roof, and a lot of that debt denominated in dollars.

And it's not just governments - local, regional, national - it's also corporations. In the US we have a bunch of zombie corporations as they're called, with massive debt. Same thing is happening around the globe and a lot of that debt is denominated in dollars.

I was curious when this week mainstream media highlight "China is replacing the reserve currency." Why are they hyping this when I don't think this is really happening? I think they're trying to hype military conflict with China by saying, "see, China is such a threat that they're trying to replace the US dollar as reserve currency, we have to respond with military power." I think people are overreacting and taking the bait on this idea of the yuan replacing the dollar.

Alexander points out that in the short-term, having the reserve currency is very attractive but over time it atrophies and hollows out your economic base as happened in Britain. It's like a drug that makes you feel great in the short-term but weakens you over time. As for the US losing reserve currency status, he thinks US would absorb it and quickly recover, that a lot of the latent strengths in the US system which do not exist in Britain would come into play very quickly.

He also doesn't think the Chinese have any intention of making the yuan a substitute for the dollar for exactly the reasons you said. I think to the extent they've been talking about a new reserve currency, the idea is an artificial currency functioning via the BRICS.

The war on crypto as a step tiward CBDCs

Barnes says one potential alternative to the eurodollar system is a central bank digital currency. A lot of Western efforts to create their own CBDCs was derailed by the weaponization of their financial system against Russia, terrifying the entire rest of the globe and dissidents in their own country from ever trusting that kind of system - I don't want to have my ability to pay for food, transportation, housing, electricity and water dependent on whether I've met my social credit score today.

So I think that's backfired but I think what they might try to replace it with a central bank digital currency from an "independent" organization like the IMF.

The whole reason the eurodollar was created is because you no longer needed a printed piece of paper that could only be issued by the US government. they realized in Europe and the whole globe over time, we don't need a paper dollar, we're a bank, we can just say we'll loan you money and just call it dollars. It's all electronic anyway.

But what's the competitor to all this? Crypto, bitcoin, alternative digital currencies. It's probably not a coincidence that the banks they're allowing to collapse in the US are directly tied to the crypto industry. It's not a coincidence that they let FTX develop, let Sam Bankman-Fried be a big star and then turn around and indict him, because they're using his entire case on the front end and on the back side,** to be an example of why you have to limit crypto. It's not a coincidence that at the same time these other events are happening - they're suddenly **accusing the crypto space of criminal fraud and targeting crypto-connected banks - that they're also trying to tax crypto on the IRS side and escalating tax authority, investigations and inquiries, but not only that, but the SEC is going after (Crypto) Library, going after Ripple and others in the crypto on the grounds they're selling "unregistered" securities, even going after YouTubers who merely talk about it - they're being greenlighted to sue in the FTX context, as co-conspirators and as promoting an unregistered security. They're also being targeted by the FCC, which is opening civil and criminal investigations into any YouTuber who even talked about certain crypto tokens on the grounds they were an unregistered promoter under FCC rules.This is a coordinated plan to take out crypto.

So expect to see a continued Western war on crypto. I think all of the governments fear crypto as an alternative medium of exchange, especially bitcoin, that could displace their government- ordered fiat currency systems that give them so much power over their own populations. And especially if they want a digital global currency to replace it, they need to make sure that bitcoin is not that digital global currency, they want to replace the eurodollar system with one that they still control.

(will edit tomorrow, too tired right now)