On the Adriatic coast this week, thousands of Albanians waved inflatable flamingos outside the prime minister’s office and chanted that their country is not for sale. They were protesting a luxury resort tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, planned for a protected lagoon and a former military island. The flamingos are charming. The thing they are fighting is not.
What is unfolding on Sazan Island and the Narta lagoon is a textbook case of state capture, and it is worth slowing down to name it. This edition is less about the princelings than about the people who make princelings possible, because that is where the real machinery sits. Some of those enablers are foreign autocrats. Some are Republicans studying their shoes. And some, we regret to report, are Democrats who keep voting to hand the crypto industry the legal cover it has been begging for.
What state capture means
State capture is not ordinary bribery. It is the moment when private interests gain enough leverage over a government that they can rewrite the rules themselves, the laws, the land titles, the permits, the protected-area maps, all bent to serve a few insiders rather than the public. Analysts coined the term for post-Soviet oligarchs who bought whole ministries. The American version wears fewer Adidas tracksuits.
Jared Kushner is the clearest indicator we have. People like Kushner and the Trump children do not land 99-year gratis leases, custom-built investor laws, and national parks to bulldoze because they are brilliant at business. They land them because their family controls the government. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund put $2 billion into Kushner’s firm in 2021 even after its own screening committee, according to congressional investigators and reporting compiled by AGBI, recommended rejecting him over his inexperience and excessive fees. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled them because he recognized what this was. America didn’t because we’ve had the luxury of not having to exercise those muscles for decades (and arguably centuries).
Happy birthday, America! You can go to a monster truck rally or ultimate fighting (UFC) match and celebrate
Roughly 99% of Affinity Partners’ “investment” comes from foreign governments, mostly Gulf states, and the House Judiciary Committee is investigating it. We ask why on earth the Democrats are putting all their eggs in these investigations when it’s clearly – clearly – access being priced and sold?
Investigate, of course. Put all this on the record. But do something about it. In very many cases Congress doesn’t have the power to stop this. State governments do. We cite specific examples. Every. Single. Week. It should exasperate us all that the party positioned to lead the pro-democracy opposition, instead of wielding the raw power they have in spades, chooses to bang away at things in Congress, which they don’t control and which doesn’t have the power to stop some of this anyway.
Sigh.
Thousands rally in Albania in largest protest yet against the Kushner resort
Al Jazeera, June 11, 2026
The protests are now in their second week and growing. Demonstrators have branded the movement the Flamingo Revolution, after the birds that nest in the Vjosa-Narta wetland where the resort and a companion development on Sazan Island would rise. The wetland also shelters seals and sea turtles, and supports nesting sites. This week, the crowd stretched half a mile down a Tirana boulevard under banners reading “Albania is not for sale,” with some carrying signs saying they do not want their country turned into Dubai. Prime Minister Edi Rama, in power since 2013, told Reuters on June 8 that the work goes ahead no matter what, pitching the projects as a windfall worth up to 5 billion euros for one of Europe’s poorest economies. Ivanka Trump, for her part, told a podcast last month that she and Kushner discovered the island while sailing and were captivated after swimming ashore and hiking barefoot to the top. The flamingos were not consulted. Nor the Albanians. For those keeping track, this is now the second Balkan nation in which Kushner’s corruption has almost sparked a color revolution. Before Kushner’s corrupt project in Belgrade almost got him thrown out of office, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić pulled the plug. Pro tip for autocrats thinking of buying influence through Kushner: He is building a track record of being a trigger for color revolutions. Buyer beware.
Albania opens a corruption inquiry into the Kushner-linked land deal
Al Jazeera, June 4, 2026
We can thank Kushner for giving Americans a civics lesson on state capture. The reason Eastern Europeans are reacting so viscerally to this is that they know from experience how this ends. Americans do not. Our implicit mission is to help teach our fellow citizens before they have to learn the hard way. Back to Albania…the government held no public consultation before the bulldozers arrived. Residents say the first they knew of it was machines cutting roads through the dunes, and the government has still not published the development permit it claims to hold, the conservation group PPNEA told CBS News. The government gave Kushner’s company a strategic investor designation in December, a designation granted by a committee that Rama himself chairs. That let a Kushner-linked company bypass the law and start bulldozing a national park. This week, SPAK, Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor, opened an investigation into how the land titles were acquired and sold to the investors. The same office is already prosecuting a deputy prime minister whose arrest the socialist-majority parliament has voted to block. Similar events almost ended Vučić’s rule.
For those wanting a primer on Kushner’s Serbian fiasco
Popular Information’s December post-mortem is quite good.
In Serbia, Affinity secured a 99-year lease, for free, to raze a national monument and war memorial and replace it with a Trump Tower. On Kushner’s behalf, the government lifted the protection using a forged document. The official who signed off (not Vučić, of course) was arrested. Serbian prosecutors indicted the culture minister and three others. Affinity withdrew. The fast-track law enabling the project is still on the books, but Vučić’s government barely escaped intact. Albania is speed-running the same play. Rama seems not yet to realize that the public is now in charge of whether it gets finished. The longevity of his government may hinge on how quickly he learns this lesson.
The CLARITY Act reaches the Senate floor calendar as a crypto vote nears
crypto.news, June 9, 2026
Now, to the state-capture enablers in our own Congress. The crypto market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, landed on the Senate floor calendar on June 1 and could get a vote before the August recess. However, floor time this week was consumed by a fight over the expiration of surveillance authority. Galaxy Digital’s research head cut his odds that the bill will become law this year from 75% to 60% on the calendar crunch alone. We’re rooting for failure. The bill would hand the crypto industry the light-touch federal rulebook it has wanted for years, yet it still contains no provision to stop the president from profiting from the industry it governs. Two Democrats, Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, already crossed over to advance it in committee. Mark Warner co-wrote the Democratic framework that gave the effort its bipartisan veneer, and Elissa Slotkin voted last year for the GENIUS Act, which legalized stablecoins, the money-laundering dream now minting money for the Trump family. We get that none of them want to admit they were duped. But they were. Roughly seven Democratic votes will decide whether this becomes law.
Andreessen Horowitz is outspending Musk and Soros in the midterms
Latin Times, citing New York Times reporting, May 2026
None of those crypto-friendly Democrats are operating in a vacuum. They are operating within a money field built by a single venture capital firm. Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley fund known as a16z, has become the largest disclosed donor bloc of the 2026 midterms, pouring more than $115 million into federal politics, nearly double what it spent in 2024. That puts it ahead of George Soros, Elon Musk, and Jeff Yass. About $48 million of that went to Fairshake, the crypto super PAC, with another $50 million to an allied artificial-intelligence PAC. Fairshake is deliberately bipartisan, funding a Democratic arm and a Republican arm, which is the entire point. It rewards crypto-friendly candidates of either party and threatens the rest. Marc Andreessen, who advises the White House on technology, and fellow travelers like Peter Thiel did not build this on-ramp by accident. His former VR colleague put it bluntly: These corrupt billionaires are buying off our democracy. The princelings are just riding the rails that the broligarchy laid. Welcome to state capture.
Trump’s World Liberty Financial froze user wallets, and an exchange dumped its stablecoin
99Bitcoins via TradingView, June 7, 2026
Around June 5, the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, froze a batch of crypto tied to the exchange HTX, citing a sanctions-compliance review after Britain sanctioned the entity behind HTX over roughly $1.5 billion in suspected Kremlin-linked flows. HTX, run by early World Liberty backer Justin Sun, responded by delisting the family’s USD1 stablecoin and threatening to sue. Set aside for a moment the drama of Trump freezing assets on the platform of his largest investor, a man with credible allegations of ties to the Chinese Communist Party and for whom Trump’s SEC quashed a major criminal investigation. A company half-owned by the sitting president’s family can now freeze the dollar balances of ordinary people outside the rule of law. USD1 has swollen to about $4.6 billion in supply, a top-five stablecoin custodied by BitGo with reserves at BlackRock, and on June 9, Binance began dangling double-digit yields to attract more. Corruption is an ecosystem. The petty thievery, Serbia, Albania, 1789 Capital, etc., all froths downstream from Trump’s Death Star of corruption, WLF, because that’s fueling the profits for the cryptobros who are buying our elections. So when you hear any Democrat rationalizing their support for crypto, Jared Kushner’s embarrassing chicanery is what they’re ultimately rationalizing.
One more thing
Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson in late May on Little Pipe Cay, a 38-acre private island in the Bahamas that has been featured in James Bond and Pirates of the Caribbean films. We note, for the record, that the family has a multigenerational thing for private Caribbean islands.
Princeling Monitor
Where the running threads stand this week.
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