Adam Holzband

Lover of food, cocktails, Texas swimming holes, @jodiholzband, & other well-designed things. Sr. Mgr., Product Management @amazon Last Mile

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

If I were president and I wanted to tank the dollar and get rich off it, here is exactly what I would do.

I would hire a Treasury Secretary who already made $3.5 billion crashing another country's currency. I would put my guy in charge of the agency that approves bank charters. I would install a crypto czar with $200M in crypto holdings and give him an ethics waiver so nobody could challenge it.

Then I would sign an executive order banning the government from ever creating a digital dollar so there was no competition.

Then I would have my family launch their own private digital dollar. My family takes 75% of net profits. I would grow it to $4.6 billion in circulation and route a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign fund deal through it to prove it works.

Then I would get Congress to pass a law requiring every stablecoin in the country to hold short-term Treasury bills. Now every dollar of my digital currency is a forced buyer of government debt. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive demand by 2030.

Then I would have my OCC guy grant my family's company a federal bank charter. Now I can issue my digital dollar with federal authority.

Then I would have my Treasury Secretary weaken the actual dollar. Bond buybacks that suppress yields but tank the currency. Build a $950 billion war chest for more. Let the debt hit $40 trillion. Dollar index drops to 99. Gold goes to highest point ever.

Then I would kill the Corporate Transparency Act and delete the FinCEN beneficial ownership database. That was the one law that required every shell company in America to report who actually owns it. Without it, nobody can trace who is buying my stablecoin, who is routing money through it, or where the profits land.

Then I would let the loop run. Weaker dollar drives demand for "stable" digital alternatives. The law I passed forces those alternatives to buy T-bills. That funds the government's debt. My family takes profit on every transaction. Foreign central banks walking away from Treasuries get replaced by legally mandated stablecoin reserves my family controls.

Then I would use sanctions to start cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely. And when those countries need a new way to transact in dollars, the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence is mine. They can buy it through shell companies nobody can trace because I deleted the ownership database.

I just built a toll booth on the global financial system. I take a cut every time someone uses the dollar. And I made it so nobody can see who is paying.

And every single step I just described has already happened.

So what does that mean for you and I?

The reason the United States can borrow at low rates and keep your mortgage and your car payment and your import prices stable is because foreign central banks hold trillions in dollar reserves. That system has always been public. The benefit went to everyone. Lower borrowing costs, cheaper goods , and the single biggest economic advantage any country has ever had.

What I just described is the privatization of that function. The entity buying the debt is no longer a central bank acting in the public interest. It is a private company taking 75% of net profits for one family. The reserve function used to generate a public benefit. Now it generates a private fee.

Your purchasing power shrinks every time the dollar weakens. Your 401k buys less in real terms. Everything you import costs more. And every time the dollar drops, demand for the private digital alternative goes up. The one the president's family owns. The one that by law must buy government debt.

You absorb the cost of a weakening dollar. His family collects the profit. That is the trade.

The enforcement mechanism to stop a sitting president from doing this? There isn't one. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says it would be a violation for literally any other federal employee, but not the president.

Nobody voted for this. No one was asked. There was no debate. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no one investigating it. The Senate tried and it was blocked.

This is the largest conflict of interest in American history happening in broad daylight while everyone argues about something else.

So what do you do? Share this. Make it impossible to ignore. Send it to your representative, your senator, every journalist you follow. We make them answer for it.
Because the only thing protecting this scheme right now is the fact that not enough people understand it yet.

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@HPbasketball Neo

[JimiRocks @Jimi_Stella]

This is what a patriot looks like, Jerry Garcia
#DeadHeadLife

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

A war hawk or a peace advocate? Over the past couple of weeks, what I have shared online about my views on the war between Israel and Iran has made for quite an uncomfortable situation for myself, and for my relationship with friends, allies, and those who have long supported my messaging and work regarding Gaza, Israel and Palestine. I wanted to share some brief thoughts in the hope of clarifying what I have been thinking and where I am coming from, even if that still leaves people unhappy with what I have been saying.

I have been uncomfortable with the fact that while I despise Benjamin Netanyahu and the current Israeli government, and I strongly disagree with some of the decisions and foreign policy of the Trump Administration, I also recognize that Gaza’s destruction and annihilation are partially due to direct actions by the Mullahs’ regime which played a critical role in setting Gaza up for perpetual war.

I have been ferociously opposed to Hamas in part because of its despicable alliance with the fascist Islamic Republic of Iran and its regime. Tehran has long abused the Palestinian cause, especially the Gaza Strip, to build a terror base from which it can use Palestinians as pawns in the fight against Israel.

I and millions of Palestinians have long opposed Iranian meddling in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian national project for independence and statehood, which was undermined by financial, material, political, and propaganda support for Hamas and terror factions in Gaza, all as part of the so-called “axis of resistance,” which was the touted ring of fire surrounding Israel. But this ring of fire was only meant to entrench the Mullahs’ grip on power and keep Israel and the United States away from Iran’s prized nuclear weapons program.

What made me exceptionally uncomfortable is the fact that I felt that something potentially positive was being done by terrible players; as in, Iran was facing the consequences of its belligerence, the climax of which was on display during the October 7 attacks that ultimately got Gaza and the Palestinian people decimated by the most far-right government in Israel’s history.

Unfortunately, many leftists, anti-war types, and isolationists were willing to let a criminal regime proceed with obtaining the deadliest weapons that would have unleashed further death and destruction upon the Arab, Sunni, and Palestinian people throughout the Middle East.

There will never be a safe, independent, stable, or prosperous Palestinian nation and state while the Islamic Republic of Iran exists in its current shape and form. I am a peace advocate who believes in pragmatic steps to end territorial disputes and stop needless bloodshed in the name of nationalism, ethnic supremacy, and intolerance. What I am not is a pacifist who rejects the pragmatic and targeted application of violence under very specific and narrow circumstances to forestall or prevent greater harm.

Do I think that the Israeli government is necessarily a trustworthy player to carry out such a task? I am not so sure. But do I believe that the Iranian regime must finally face deadly consequences for its horrendous acts that got hundreds of thousands of Arab people in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and not to mention other meddling in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and beyond? Absolutely, yes.

After all, the removal of Hamas in Gaza to end the terror group’s control and initiate transformation and recovery requires the targeted application of violence against the group’s infrastructure and operatives, ideally, by Palestinians to save Palestinian lives and end the suffering once and for all.

This is what radical pragmatism is about: understanding that kumbayas, useless peace marches, nice-sounding declarations, social media posts, and naïve statements by out-of-touch activists will never achieve stability, peace, or actual progress for Israel and Palestine, or the broader Middle East, and the discourse without recognizing the need for narrow and uncomfortable uses of strategically-targeted force & power.

That is why I don’t call myself a peace activist, but rather a peace advocate.

[John Podhoretz @jpodhoretz]

My daughters have dreams too, just like Souliman's daughter. One of their dreams is not to be firebombed.

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@grok @Baby_Fn_Bevo @MineValulations @TheCinesthetic @grok 20 liters of water intake per person per day seems like a very high and inaccurate estimate. Recalculate the energy and water consumption based on a realistic water intake per day

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@SVG__Collection Absolute all-timer classic

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@RyanRollins41 @IcingThePunter_ Look up Eddie Gaedel

[☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ @schwarz]

When you hear Elon Musk tell Joe Rogan "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" you might think, huh, that sounds just like the Nazis. And you'd be right. Warnings that Germans are too sympathetic to others run throughout Nazi propaganda.

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@JVMonte2 Gene and Dean Ween

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

“To Hamas: You ruined our past; our present is horrendous as a result of you, and you must leave for a better future for Palestinian and Israeli societies.”

[Hamza @HowidyHamza]

In the midst of the chaos in almost every neighborhood in the Gaza Strip, as well as the devastating situation in Northern Gaza, I want to reiterate the message I delivered to Hamas during my ABC News interview: You ruined our past; our present is horrendous as a result of you, and you must leave for a better future for Palestinian and Israeli societies.

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

Excellent interview with the brilliant @harari_yuval in @TheAtlantic

‘When I hear people compare Zionism with racism, this itself is a racist statement, because Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. Turks can have national feelings, and Germans can have national feelings, but when Jews have national feelings, this is racism. Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.’

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@perpetua NIN yacht rock is a straight jam… https://t.co/fktme1Tp4w

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

Prince is The One

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Notice how we are always told to fear those with no wealth or power by those with great wealth and power.

[ryan @ryanlong03]

We don’t talk enough about how the Democrats have only had a filibuster-proof majority for 5 months 12 days since 1977 and during that time they LITERALLY PASSED THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@austinkleon Seeing King Gizzard recently, how much fun they’re having on stage while improvising, and their diverse & deep catalog has helped. People need something real, not manufactured and theres a lot of the latter around. Love this book premise and can’t wait to see where you go with it

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@jaybsauceda 💯

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

A menu is part of the experience. We go for enjoyment, not to be on phones. Menus are art, showing the personality of the place, food, & ownership. See https://t.co/vLoJWH9JNC. Menus are history, tracking culinary styles & trends across places & time. All of that is lost online.

[Adam Holzband @adamholz]

@MelissaCinOP Support @aceforkansas and help flip a seat!