Mar 6 2026

Ken Paxton Offers to Drop Out of Race if Thune and Cornyn Will Eliminate Filibuster and Pass SAVE Act

Posted originally on CTH on March 5, 2026 | Sundance

This is a pretty solid position by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who is offering to drop out of the Texas senate race if John Thune and John Cornyn will stop blocking President Trump, eliminate the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act.

Paxton gets a pass at calling Cornyn a “coward,” as the slight is negligible considering the selflessness within the offer. Paxton is a patriot and this is a solid alternative that boosts President Trump.

[SOURCE]

Mar 6 2026

China Halts Refiners from Exporting Diesel and Gasoline

Posted originally on CTH on March 5, 2026 | Sundance

An interesting reaction from Beijing highlights an evaluation of risk from the lack of oil flowing from Iran.

According to most evaluated data, China was buying more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil. That’s according to data from 2025 as analyzed by Kpler and published in January by Reuters.

Iranian oil always had limited buyers due to U.S. sanctions. However, China purchased on average 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year, according to Kpler. That represented about 13.4% of the total 10.27 million bpd of oil it imported by sea.

With President Trump previously cutting of discounted oil from Venezuela, two things unfolded. First, the Venezuela oil was no longer sold with non-petrodollar currencies; Venezuela oil is now being sold on the standard oil market. Secondly, with the Venezuela oil disrupted China would become even more dependent on Iranian oil shipments if they wanted to retain the discounted rate.

How big is the financial difference? According to Reuters, “Iranian Light crude has traded at around $8 to $10 a barrel below ICE Brent on a delivered basis to China since December.” … “That means Chinese refiners save about $8 to $10 a barrel if they buy Iranian Light rather than non-sanctioned oil.”

Additionally, as noted before Operation Epic Fury began, “Iran has a record amount of oil on the water, equivalent to around 50 days of output, as China has bought less because of sanctions and Tehran seeks to protect its supplies from the risk of U.S. strikes, Kpler said.”

Buying discounted oil from Venezuela, Iran and Russia resulted in billions of dollars saved by China. The only production venue not currently disrupted would be purchases from Moscow. This increases the dependency, but the purchase price may no longer carry any discounted value, at least not at the previous rate.

India was purchasing a significant amount of Russian oil for its own refinery use and sale back into the global market. China and India would now be bidding for what is likely a more valuable Russian export. No more discounts put the “teapot” refining operations in Shandong, China, into a squeeze. This also highlights the decision by China to limit refined exports.

[VIA NBC] – China’s government has told the country’s largest oil refiners to suspend exports of diesel and gasoline as an escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf disrupts the arrival of crude from one of the world’s largest producing regions.

Officials from the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner, met refinery executives and verbally called for a temporary suspension of refined product shipments that would begin immediately, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked not to be named, as the discussions are not public.

The refiners were asked to stop signing new contracts and to negotiate the cancellation of already-agreed shipments. The people said. An exception was made for jet and bunker fuel held in bonded storage and supplies to Hong Kong and Macau, they added.

[…] China has a vast refining sector, but much of its production is funnelled to serve domestic demand, meaning it is not a critical supplier. Across Asia, it ranks third for seaborne exports, behind South Korea and Singapore. However, Beijing’s precautionary curbs reflect efforts across the import-dependent region to prioritise domestic needs as the crisis in the Middle East deepens. (read more)

Mar 6 2026

Division, Derision and the Economics of the Thing

Posted originally on CTH on March 5, 2026 | Sundance

Do you remember this moment during the 2015 republican presidential debates when all of the candidates were on stage and leading control outlet Fox News (Bret Baier) purposefully asked the candidates:

…”is there anyone on stage, unwilling tonight, to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the republican party, and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person. Again, we are looking for you to raise your hand now if you won’t make that pledge tonight.”

[The moment in video is here] The need for control is a reaction to fear. The question was intentionally constructed to create both an optic and a narrative Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and the republican party were purposefully shaping. Collectively the professional republicans were desperately afraid Donald Trump would run as an independent candidate.

I bring us back to that moment because it is the key to understand where we are even today. This was the core of the matter. This is the “trillions at stake” aspect. This is the economics of the thing as it first manifest.

Why did Donald J Trump stand against them all?

For many years before that moment, a small group of us had been outlining why it was urgent for MAGAnomics to take charge of the U.S. economy; because underneath both wings of the UniParty in Washington DC was a system that few understood.

♦ Prior to 2016, the United States Chamber of Commerce (U.S CoC), a private K-Street lobbying consortium, were the negotiators for every single trade deal done from the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).

The U.S. government (USTR, POTUS and Congress) was the trade stakeholder who signed the agreements; however, the actual nuts and bolts of what the trade deal included, the terms and conditions, were negotiated by the US CoC.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represented the corporate interests of their Wall Street clients. After all, the corporations paid the CoC and the business model of the CoC is dependent on the corporations.

This is the larger background for how decades of trade agreements ended up with offshoring, the Rust Belt, diminished domestic manufacturing, and increased corporate profits. This is the core mechanics of how a U.S. manufacturing economy was shifted to a “service driven economy.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was writing the trade deals. The CoC would then fund the politicians who would approve the trade deals. The CoC would also finance the presidential candidates.

When President Trump ran for office in 2016, his trade, manufacturing and economic policies were against the interests of the entire business network that controlled trade. The U.S. CoC poured money into Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their main GOP partner in the enterprise, Mitch McConnell.

When Trump won the election, he completely shut out the CoC from any involvement in U.S. trade negotiations. Trump literally put himself, Wilbur Ross, and Robert Lighthizer in control.

The CoC was apoplectic but powerless to stop this action. CoC President Tom Donohue could not even get an appointment to see President Trump in the White House.

The only thing the CoC and Tom Donohue could do was to fund anyone who would assist them in removing the existential threat that Trump represented. That’s what they did.

With the CoC removed from influence, President Trump, Wilbur Ross and Robert Lighthizer began the painstaking process of taking the Wall Street profit tentacles off U.S. trade policy.

In essence, President Trump put the interests of the American citizens back into the top priority of the U.S. govt, as it pertained to the biggest of all big picture items, the U.S. economy. That’s why in 2018 and 2019 the U.S. economy was on fire with growth.

All of that MAGAnomic background remained in place when President Trump retook control in 2025, and now we are starting to see the positive economic effects again resurface. However, that collective UniParty opposition still remains, albeit significantly diminished by the refusal of President Trump to move away from America-first policy.

The core of the opposition to all of President Trump’s actions, remains almost exclusively an outcome of the economics of policy the DC system no longer controls. It’s about the money. It will always be about the money. The division we are encountering in the MAGA ranks, is specifically driven by those same financial interests who opposed candidate Donald Trump a decade ago.

When it came to trade policy, economic policy, tariff policy and the confrontation with China, there was not one iota of difference between any of the 17 republican candidates in that 2016 election.

There was not one degree of divergence from the traditional corporate economic policy of the 30 years that preceded that moment on stage. Every one of the republican candidates aligned with the CoC message.

♦ CTH had previously identified our assembly as “The Last Refuge” specifically because there was no information space, no website, no organized group, no podcast, no functional assembly who understood the basic problem and simultaneously rejected the noisy pontificating baseline notion that our status was doomed to remain as a “service driven economy.”

We rejected that notion here. So too did Donald J Trump, and subsequently we championed him.

His intention in this MAGAnomic regard has never wavered, flinched or diminished. President Trump has focused on delivering real, actionable economic benefits due to a radically shifted policy approach toward jobs, trade and the underlying blue-collar economy.

As President, Donald Trump has never stopped being Main Street First in all policy outcomes.

What we are witnessing now with the division, derision and conflict goes right back to that original set of policy distinctions.

In 2016 we did not use the term “influencers,” but they existed inside every team for every republican candidate. Dick Cheney’s daughter worked for Ben Carson. Mark Levin’s son worked for Ted Cruz. The daughter of Fox News Executive Producer for Political Content, Bill Sammon, worked for Marco Rubio.

All of those campaigns and every person in the professional republican apparatus that worked inside those campaigns had one very unique thing in common, they all adhered to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce constructs of economic policy.

Not a single candidate ever mentioned China as a strategic economic threat until Donald Trump kept hammering it. Not a single Republican ever said economic security was national security, until Donald Trump made it core policy.

Remember this core difference when you see all of these voices who backbite, bitch, complain and protest that Donald Trump is not focused enough on American interests; it’s bullshit. It is all bullshit.

Not a single republican candidate ever cared about any of this stuff until Donald J Trump made it his mission in life to fundamentally restructure the economics of everything. This is still his primary focus, and if you watch him work you will see it unfold in the outcomes of every single policy, even the foreign policy engagements.

President Trump is delivering a global shift, a multigenerational shift, in the return of U.S. power and financial WEALTH to our nation. And, he’s unbelievably good at it.