A Broken Clock
reveals corruption and fraud in the highest places
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. In the same vein, Trump is right about one or two things. Yes, there is ‘mind-blowing corruption’ in the government and yes, the immigration system is ripe with fraud. But as the two articles below demonstrate, this corruption and fraud don’t involve Somali immigrants in Minnesota; they come directly out of the White House (and Mar Largo) and bear the Presidential Seal.
They have become an integral part of the system which is further enriching a small number of Trump’s family and friends. And herein lies a weakness which can be exploited. In Trump’s game, there are winners and losers. And occasionally some of the losers are rich and powerful men.
Building a popular front including all those on the losing end of Trump’s game is necessary to blunt the rush towards an integrated fascist regime of both economic and political elites, but it is NOT ENOUGH. The best defense is a good offense. And that offense has to be led by the left and the working class. Unfortunately, we are too weak to lead at this point in the struggle, but we need to putting together the pieces that will allow us, when the time is right, to seize the initiative.
In the meantime, we need to fight that rearguard action with all the force we can!
My next post will include an in-depth analysis focusing on building a movement towards a new foreign policy based on the real balance of forces in the world around us. Ending the forever wars and redirecting much of massive military spending towards domestic needs is a beginning.
Article #1 - From Common Dreams, Mar 24, 2026
‘Mind-Blowing Corruption’: Traders Placed Massive Bets Minutes Before Trump Post on Iran
“Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?” asked US Sen. Chris Murphy.
Just minutes before US President Donald Trump momentarily boosted the stock market—and sent oil prices tumbling—with his disputed Monday announcement of peace talks with Iran, unknown traders loaded up on positions that allowed them to profit from the resulting movement in equities and commodities.
The Financial Times reported that “roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands between 6:49 am and 6:50 am New York time on Monday, just a quarter of an hour ahead of the US president’s post on Truth Social that there had in recent days been ‘productive conversations’ with Tehran to end the war in Iran.”
FT added that the notional value of those trades was $580 million.
“Trading volumes for Brent and WTI leapt at the same time, 27 seconds before 6:50 am,” the newspaper reported. “Futures tracking the S&P 500 share index jumped in price moments after the oil trade, with volumes also rising significantly during that timeframe. It was not known whether one entity or several entities were behind Monday’s trades.”
An unnamed trader at a “major hedge fund” told FT that “my gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal.”
“It’s Monday morning, there’s no important data today, there aren’t any Fed speakers you’d want to front-run. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk,” the trader said. “Somebody just got a lot richer.”
A BBC review of market data similarly found that “traders bet hundreds of millions of dollars on oil contracts just minutes before” Trump’s announcement of talks with Iran. Iranian officials publicly denied that they are negotiating with the Trump administration, and Iran’s top lawmaker accused the US president of peddling “fake news” in an attempt to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.”
The suspiciously timed bets ahead of the US president’s post heightened concerns that Trump administration insiders are illegally trading on—and profiting massively from—nonpublic knowledge.
Responding to a report that $1.5 billion worth of S&P 500 futures was purchased just five minutes before Trump’s Monday announcement, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked: “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?”
“This is corruption,” the senator wrote. “Mind-blowing corruption.”
Last week, Murphy joined US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) in unveiling legislation that would ban prediction markets on “government actions, terrorism, war, assassination, and events where an individual knows or controls the outcome.”
The bill came on the heels of suspiciously timed, highly profitable bets related to US military actions in Venezuela and Iran.
The Guardian reported Monday that several newly created accounts on the online prediction platform Polymarket “laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts.”
Researcher Ben Yorke told the newspaper that the accounts—which are anonymous—“definitely” look like “someone with some degree of inside info.”
The Guardian noted that “online crypto watchers and experts suggested that the bets bore the signs of insider trading—both because they bought their positions at market price, and because some of the accounts looked like they could belong to a single investor attempting to conceal their identity by splitting their bet between multiple wallets.”
According to Yorke, “Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading.”
The Trump White House insisted Monday that any suggestion of insider trading “is baseless and irresponsible reporting.”
“The White House does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai.
Article #2 - From Common Dreams, by Stephen Prager, March 24, 2026
Trump State Dept. Accused of ‘Largest Fee Fraud in History’ of US Immigration System
An immigration researcher at the Cato Institute found that the Trump administration is “raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to.”
The US State Department under President Donald Trump has been accused of stealing more than a billion dollars from immigrants and sponsors in what experts are calling “the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system.”
A report published last week by the Cato Institute, written by director of immigration studies David J. Bier, found that the State Department and Department of Homeland Security were receiving millions of applications from immigrants whom Trump has made ineligible for legal status and pocketing the fees without ever processing the requests.
“The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications,” said Austin Kocher, a fellow at Immigration Lab and a professor at Newhouse and Syracuse University in a social media post breaking down the report on Monday. “No denials. No refunds. Just silence.”
The report zeroes in on a series of policies signed by Trump and enacted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) head Joseph Edlow, which have collectively barred nationals from 92 countries from immigrating to the US.
One proclamation signed by Trump in December bans legal entry and most visas for the nationals of 40 nations—including Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, and Haiti—based on nationality. A memo sent by Edlow extended the freeze to many USCIS immigration-benefit applications for people from targeted countries already living in the US, including work authorization and permanent residency filings
Another State Department policy bans visa applications from immigrants in 75 countries from being processed indefinitely, purportedly based on data showing that residents of those countries use welfare at disproportionately high rates.
These policies block more than 320,000 people abroad from entering the US and potentially as many as 561,000 potential permanent residents when those already living in the US are considered.
Although people from these countries are categorically denied immigrant visas and most other visa types under a series of travel bans signed by Trump, the government is still collecting fees for visas, work permits, and green cards.
The report cited evidence that the department has directed consular officers that they “should not counsel applicants or advise them” that they are subject to the bans when they come in for their interviews, because it “could be seen as pre-adjudication.”
Upon revealing this directive last month, immigration attorney Curtis Morrison described it as a way that “embassies scam visa applicants subject to the travel ban out of fees.”
As Bier explained:
To immigrate to the United States or to obtain authorization to work or travel internationally, noncitizens must usually pay a fee to have their applications processed. USCIS’s immigration fee revenues were nearly $7 billion, and the Consular Affairs budget was about $6 billion.
The fees stack up. For instance, to sponsor a spouse, a US citizen must pay a $675 fee to USCIS to petition for their spouse to obtain lawful permanent residence. Then, the immigrant must pay $1,440 to adjust status from temporary to permanent residence. That application takes so long that people usually pay $560 for the spouse to receive an employment authorization document, so the total fees can add up to $2,675.
Bier estimated that more than 2 million applications were affected by the bans, with fees coming primarily from work permit filings and permanent residency or immigrant visa applications.
He explained that these fees are difficult to track precisely because the government does not publish detailed statistics on them. He was also forced to rely on out-of-date fee statistics from 2023-24 because the Trump administration “has simply stopped publishing most statistics.”
That said, Bier noted that the numbers are most likely to “understate reality” because they include only those who likely had their requests processed in the past year, not those whose processing was delayed by backlogs.
Of the more than $1 billion in fees the Trump administration would have collected for services it never rendered, data from previous years suggested that about $543 million came from Cuban immigrants, who filed about 935,000 applications during the period under review.
The next highest were Venezuelans, who paid an estimated $138 million in fees. Iranians, Haitians, and Afghans were also among the nationalities with the highest numbers of unprocessed applications.
The Trump administration has used high-profile instances of fraud committed by members of immigrant groups, such as Somalis in Minneapolis, to cast aspersions upon entire nationalities and target them for immigration bans and attacks by federal law enforcement.
However, as Bier explained before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, based on the findings of a Cato report, “immigrants aren’t to blame” for most welfare fraud, accounting for just 5% of it, 31% less per capita than native-born US citizens.
He argued that the Department of Homeland Security “isn’t anti-fraud” but instead “openly carrying out the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system... raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to.”
“DHS and State can deny anyone who fails to make their case. Instead, this administration is pocketing thousands of dollars from hardworking Americans and their relatives, including spouses and minor children of US citizens, and then not even looking at their applications,” he said. “This is a scam. This is fraud.”