Wall Street Licks Chops Over Maduro Abduction - The Monday AM Quickie 1/5/26
Sounds like the lady who illustrated the world’s best-selling tarot card deck back in 1909 was cool as hell. - Whitney
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THE BIG NEWS
Trump Abducts Venezuelan President; Wall Street Licks Chops Over Regime Change
The United States staged a coup against Venezuela this weekend, bombing the country, killing at least 80, and abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, the NYT and Venezuelanalysis reported. US forces renditioned Maduro and Flores to New York City, where they arrived Saturday evening and were thrown into the barbaric Metropolitan Detention Center prison in Brooklyn, NBC News reported. MDC is also where federal agents are locking up immigrants from Venezuela because the US refuses to grant them asylum. Maduro and Flores are scheduled to appear in court today.
The Trump regime said the coup was just a “law enforcement operation,” so they didn’t have to notify Congress; they indicted Maduro in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for his alleged role in a massive narco-terrorism conspiracy. But that is just a flimsy cover for Trump’s real goal, which is to steal Venezuela’s oil and turn the country into a vassal state. As Zeteo points out, Venezuela has a fifth of the world’s oil and Trump has said repeatedly he wants regime change so he can take it. At a press conference Saturday, at which Trump rambled incoherently, slurred his words, swayed back and forth and struggled to keep his eyes open, he managed to croak out that the US is “going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” but had zero details. On Sunday, as he flew back to Washington from his private club in Florida, he said, “What we want to do is fix up the oil, fix up the country, bring the country back and then have elections.” He added that military action in Columbia sounded “good” and that Cuba is “ready to fall,” according to The Washington Post.
As people around the world rightly protested Trump’s illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, including some European leaders and the World Federation of Trade Unions, Wall Street execs were steepling their fingers with glee. Charles Myers, chairman of consulting firm Signum Global Advisors and a former head of investment advisory firm Evercore, for example, is planning a trip to Venezuela in March with executives “from top hedge funds and asset managers” to discuss what he expects will be $500 to $750 billion worth of “investment prospects,” according to the Wall Street Journal. His committee of vultures will “meet with the new government including the new president, finance minister, energy minister, economy minister, head of the central bank and the Caracas stock exchange.” Meanwhile, an anonymous Polymarket user made $400,000 predicting that a US invasion of Venezuela was imminent. Was it a regime agent? Or someone at the NYT or Washington Post, who also knew about the invasion before it happened and kept quiet?
While insiders used their positions to line their pockets, regular Venezuelans protested US imperialism. Drop Site News interviewed Christian Peach Ortiz, a Venezuelan man from the state of Miranda, who joined a protest outside the Miraflores Presidential Palace to demand Maduro’s return. He said he and his family “understood immediately what was going on: the United States empire has a history of domination towards the people of the global south...They’re trying to recompose the geopolitical balance of the world.” He also had a message for people in the US: “We need you to raise your voice; we need you to protest; we need you to condemn the US empire that finally needs to die to save the entire world and humanity for a model of life and reconstruction.”
MORE STORIES TO WATCH
Workers Expose Secretive Data Centers
Researchers at the nonprofit Epoch AI are using open-source data to map the locations and owners of data centers, 404 Media reported. It’s information that politicians and tech industry executives hide because they know how unpopular data centers are and want to keep building them. Data centers suck to live near and wreck the environment. The artificial intelligence they enable is meaningless slop that most Americans hate, and which encourages users to kill themselves and others.
The Epoch AI team “pores over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer-filled buildings springing up across the United States. They take that data and turn it into an interactive map that lists their costs, power output, and owners.” The map includes just a fraction of the data centers that tech companies are building all over the country with zero regard for the surrounding communities; by November it represented about 15 percent of AI compute delivered by chip manufacturers around the world. As 404 Media put it, “Information about the data centers is incomplete. It’s impossible to know exactly how much everything costs and how it will run. State and local laws are variable so not all construction information is public and satellite imagery can only tell a person so much about what’s happening on the ground.” That’s the way executives, politicians and local officials want it. Take, for example, the officials at the Western Virginia Water Authority, who refused to say how much water a possible Google center in Botetourt County might use and told a reporter at The Roanoke Rambler that the information was “proprietary.” The Rambler sued and won in November.
Activists Expose Secretive Immigration Thugs
As the American Gestapo prepares to expand its immigrant terror campaign, activists are collecting information on agents’ vehicles to track their movements, The Intercept reported. The activists’ database “currently lists more than 600 plates matched to the make and model of the vehicle they were spotted on,” mostly from enforcement actions in and around Portland, Oregon. “It helps reduce the unknown and reduce fear,” one activist told The Intercept. “ICE is doing whatever they can to be undetected,” so the group wants to do all it can to “chip away at that obfuscation.” The activists are using a decentralized, peer-to-peer file distribution method, rather than a centralized website that could be subject to subpoenas or takedown orders. “The reason we’re confident in what we released is that we have probably twice as many plates as what was published, but we made a decision to only publish those plates that had at least two observations,” said the activist. “And while we’re confident in the rest of the database, this was an extra measure to reduce confusion and inaccuracies. We want people to feel like they can trust what we’re publishing, and we don’t want to accidentally cause harm by releasing inaccurate information.” View the database here.
QUICKEST QUICKIES
- 7-Year-Old Palestinian Boy Drowns in Flooded Tent Rescuers had to “pry” the body of Ata Mai from the mud. At least six children have died in recent days from weather-related causes in Gaza because the US-backed Israeli government is forcing nearly the entire population, more than 2 million people, to endure the winter with little or no shelter. via the AP.
- 19 Killed, 990 Arrested as Iran Protests Spread Nationwide “A threat by US President Donald Trump warning Iran that if Tehran ‘violently kills peaceful protesters’ the US ‘will come to their rescue,’ has taken on new meaning after American troops [abducted] Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a longtime ally of Tehran.” via the AP and NBC News.
- Trump Implies Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Ordered Rep. Melissa Hortman’s Assassination “Dangerous, depraved behavior from the sitting president of the United States,” Walz wrote Saturday on social media, after Trump reposted the claim that Walz used alleged killer Vance Boelter to murder Hortman. “In covering for an actual serial killer, he is going to get more innocent people killed. America is better than this.” via HuffPost.
- Wisconsin Judge Resigns After Felony Conviction Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan left the bench this weekend rather than allow Republicans to impeach her. A jury last month convicted Dugan on a charge of obstruction, a felony, after an incident in April in which she led a Mexican immigrant through a private jury door as federal agents stalked him outside her courtroom. Dugan faces up to five years in prison. via The Guardian and the NYT.
SOME NUMBER
4,000
That’s how many new agents and officers the Secret Service is planning to hire by 2028 ahead of major events that year, including the presidential election and the Olympics in Los Angeles, according to The Washington Post. The hiring spree would increase the agency’s workforce to more than 10,000 for the first time and “has no clear precedent,” law enforcement experts told the Post. It “reflects mounting concerns about staff burnout, a loss of experienced agents and a relentless operational tempo.”
ON THE SHOW TODAY
1/5: Today’s guest is José Luis Granados Ceja, who covers Latin America for Drop Site News and will discuss Trump’s illegal war on Venezuela.
DON'T MISS MR CLIPS
Activists Disrupting ICE | Robert Camacho | TMR
Read Camacho’s coverage of Trump’s racist terror campaign in Bolts and the Times of San Diego.
US Child Detained By Israel Is Finally Free
Jasper Nathaniel wrote in his newsletter, Infinite Jaz, about the release of sixteen-year-old Florida kid Mohammed Ibrahim, whom Israeli officials imprisoned and tortured for almost a year for supposedly throwing a stone.
PARTING WORDS
“Beginning January 2026, TrumpKennedyCenter.org enters a new era of devotion, unity and inherited authority. We exist to preserve what must endure, to honor what must not be questioned, and to gather those who understand that greatness is not chosen, it is recognized.”
-- A message on the website trumpkennedycenter.org, which South Park writer Toby Morton bought after Trump illegally took over the landmark arts venue and glued his name onto the building. The real website now refers to the center as the Trump Kennedy Center, though its URL is still kennedy-center.org. Multiple artists have cancelled their upcoming performances in protest of Trump’s takeover. Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz is the most recent. Schwartz said in a statement Saturday that he will no longer host a gala later this year because the center was no longer an “apolitical home for free artistic expression for artists of all nationalities and ideologies,” as it was founded to be. “Appearing there has now become an ideological statement,” he said.
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