Is anybody home in Congress?

 

Is anybody home in Congress?

Apparently, there is no longer a United States legislative branch, or they have gone missing in action. Because everything I see coming out of the executive branch is that they are irrelevant.

1. Project Vault — Plain-English Translation

What JD Vance or JD Bowman, J Hamel, or whatever his name is, says:
“A Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve to protect supply chains and national security.”

What it actually means:

The U.S. government is backstopping a $10 billion private minerals warehousing and trading operation, run by major manufacturers and global commodity traders, using taxpayer-backed credit—without Congressional appropriation—under the banner of “national security.”

The materials will be:

• Bought with government-backed loans
• Stored domestically
• Controlled by a private governance structure
• Released based on rules you do not see

This is not a public reserve in the classical sense.
It is a state-guaranteed inventory pool for the wealthy corporations.

---

2. The $10B — Where it really comes from

Let’s be very precise.

• EXIM did not “find” $10B
• Congress did not vote on $10B unless Mike Johnson found it while he was on his knees.
• Taxpayers were not asked

EXIM used its authority to create credit, backed by:

• The U.S. Treasury
• The implicit promise: “If this blows up, we’ve got it.”

This is monetary power without budgetary friction.

That alone should trigger alarms. But there is no longer any intelligence in Congress and so what is the point.

---

3. Who actually controls Project Vault?

They use the phrase:

“Independently governed public-private partnership”

Translation:

• Not a federal agency
• Not fully subject to FOIA
• Not elected
• Not price-transparent
• Not democratically accountable

Independently governed = insulated from oversight

This is exactly how you design something if:

• You want flexibility for insiders
• You want plausible deniability for politicians
• You want to avoid messy hearings later

---

4. Now the core: Risk vs. Reward Map

Risk (who eats losses)

Taxpayers

• If prices fall
• If demand projections fail
• If materials become obsolete
• If mismanagement occurs
• If geopolitics shift the wrong way

You won’t hear this, but it’s real.

---

Guaranteed Winners (no matter what)

1. Large OEMs (Boeing, GE, etc.)

• Locked-in access
• Reduced volatility
• Preferential supply
• No capital tied up
• No market risk

They get insurance without paying market rates for it.

---

2. Commodity Trading Houses (Mercuria, Traxys, Hartree)

This is the jackpot.

They specialize in:

• Storage
• Forward contracts
• Arbitrage
• Volatility
• Market timing

Now add:

• Government-backed financing
• Guaranteed buyers
• Strategic justification
• Political cover

This is trader heaven.

---

Who is missing (and that’s loud)

• Small manufacturers
• Domestic mining cooperatives
• New entrants
• Transparent public pricing
• Citizen equity participation

If this were truly about resilience, these would be central.

They aren’t.

---

5. The most dangerous sentence in the entire text

“Delivers a net positive return for U.S. taxpayers”

This sentence appears without:

• A rate of return
• A loss scenario
• A downside cap
• A clawback clause
• A public audit mechanism

That sentence is faith-based finance.

Historically, whenever governments say this before the project runs, it means:

Upside is privatized, downside is socialized.

---

6. Why this feels “cooked”

Pattern recognition, not paranoia.

This checks every box of a familiar maneuver:

• Crisis language without a crisis
• Off-budget financing
• Private control under “security” branding
• Big incumbents only
• Commodity traders embedded
• Zero transparency on rules
• Moral shield: national interest

That combo has never been about the public.

---

7. The quiet truth no one is saying out loud

This is not a reserve.

It is a government-enabled industrial price-control and risk-transfer mechanism, designed to:

• Protect major corporations
• Stabilize their input costs
• Preserve margins
• While shifting volatility to the public balance sheet

That’s why it smells wrong.
Because it is structurally asymmetric.