By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2025 ~ The New York Times’ Sunday, March 23 newspaper featured a lead story on how the 1,000-lawyer Big Law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a Wall Street favorite, had caved to threats in a Presidential Action from Donald Trump, which would have banned lawyers at the firm from entering federal buildings; from reviewing classified documents for their clients by stripping them of security clearance; and effectively blacklisting the firm as a member of Donald Trump’s enemy list. The Chair of Paul Weiss, Brad Karp, negotiated with Trump and got the order rescinded by agreeing to spend $40 million in pro bono work on projects amenable to Trump — along with other subservient concessions. Trump’s move against Paul Weiss followed his similar actions against Big Law firms Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling. Unlike Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie hired another Big … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 19, 2025 ~ On February 10, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that suspended the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days, giving an all clear to U.S. corporations to bribe officials in foreign countries to get business deals approved. The order bars federal prosecutors from starting any new FCPA investigations, enforcing new actions and orders a review of existing FCPA investigations to “restore proper bounds” on applying the FCPA law. The FCPA, enacted in 1977, has been the law of the United States for almost half a century. In July 2020, the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission issued a comprehensive and updated guide to the FCPA. It explained its purpose as follows: “Foreign bribery is a scourge that must be eradicated. It undermines the rule of law, empowers authoritarian rulers, distorts free and fair markets, disadvantages honest and ethical companies, and threatens … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2025 ~ During Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) political career, three of his five largest campaign donors have been Wall Street megabanks – Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. His second largest campaign donor over his political career are the partners and employees of Big Law firm Paul Weiss, where his brother, Robert, is actively engaged in Mergers and Acquisitions by major corporations that are publicly traded on Wall Street. Paul Weiss, as a firm, represents some of the largest banks and trading houses on Wall Street. Last week Schumer, the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, did a major pivot between Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday he vowed that Democrats would stand firm in voting against the Republican version of a Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the federal government open, a spending bill deeply opposed by the majority of Congressional Democrats, who viewed it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2024 ~ Billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk share a common credo: It’s legal if you can get away with it. (Key evidence to support that claim is the jury conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts and his ability to secure a second term as President and the fact that Musk and his companies were under investigation by five federal Inspectors General – right before Donald Trump fired them and made Musk the investigator. There is also the not insignificant detail reported by the Wall Street Journal that Musk uses illegal drugs.) This credo came crashing down on the heads of both men yesterday. The U.S. stock market, a barometer of presidential leadership, plunged. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 890 points while the tech heavy Nasdaq dived 727.89 points or 4 percent. Tesla, the electric vehicle company where Musk serves as the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2025 ~ Last Thursday, while taking questions from the press in the Oval Office (where the 59-Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press is still banned by Donald Trump) the President called out by name two MSNBC news program hosts that he said “should be forced to resign.” The journalists are Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow, both of whom have doggedly connected the dots for their viewers on Trump’s grifting and unsavory alignment with his largest campaign donors and with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s attack on these two specific journalists followed a more general attack on the MSNBC cable network on February 18 during a Sean Hannity interview. Five days later, Joy Reid, another MSNBC program host – and one of Trump’s worst critics – learned that her program had been abruptly cancelled. (See our report: News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2025 ~ On the very day that Donald Trump is set to deliver a major address to a joint session of Congress, with a disapproval rating of 52 percent according to a CNN poll out on Sunday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s model for predicting U.S. economic growth is flashing red. The model is known as GDPNow and is highly respected for its accuracy. After an update yesterday based on new, incoming economic data, GDP for the first quarter is predicted to be -2.8 percent. The GDPNow staffers wrote this yesterday: “The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 3, down from -1.5 percent on February 28. After this morning’s releases from the US Census Bureau and the Institute for Supply Management, the nowcast of first-quarter real personal consumption expenditures … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 3, 2025 ~ Donald Trump’s gangster diplomacy and anger management issues went viral on the front page of newspapers around the globe on Saturday, following his verbal assault on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, in the Oval Office on Friday. Those headlines were then parsed and debated on Sunday’s TV news programs here in the U.S. and by U.S. based newspaper columnists. Margaret Brennan of the CBS News program, Face the Nation, reported on her program on Sunday morning that “Our social media producers tell us that, as of this morning, we have had more than 100 million views on posts related to the meeting across our CBS News social media platforms.” The reason for the unprecedented interest is because no other U.S. President in history has conducted such thug “diplomacy” with a foreign ally by screaming at him in the Oval Office in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2025 ~ On June 29, 2010 when the electric vehicle company, Tesla, launched its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Stock Market, its underwriters were trading powerhouses on Wall Street: Goldman, Sachs & Co., Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Deutsche Bank Securities. Over the next dozen years, Tesla would utilize these investment banks and others to raise billions more in secondary stock offerings of Tesla shares. It was a very happy marriage. The Wall Street megabanks made big fees on the underwritings and Musk was able to cash out tens of billions of dollars for himself in Tesla stock sales. That happy, mutually beneficial relationship turned sour when Musk borrowed $13 billion from a consortium of the megabanks to help fund his purchase of the social medium platform, Twitter, in 2022. (Musk has since renamed Twitter as “X.”) The banks got stuck with these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 25, 2025 ~ During Donald Trump’s first term as president, while Mike Pompeo was serving as his Secretary of State, the State Department authorized a government contract on September 23, 2019 to translate and publish a book for young people that lavished praise on Elon Musk as an inspiring role model. The book’s title was: “Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Young Readers Edition.” It was authored by then Bloomberg/Businessweek writer, Ashlee Vance, and based on his New York Times bestseller for adults, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and The Quest for a Fantastic Future.” Curiously, however, the book wasn’t for U.S. children or even children on the same continent. The State Department award went to an organization called Steps to Success Public Association in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan. The federal account from which the $17,054 contract came was USAID, the federal agency that has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2025 ~ On Thursday, February 13, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, host of the news program, The ReidOut, said this on air: “If Donald Trump announced tomorrow that he was selling the United States to Vladimir Putin personally and that we will now be owned by the Kremlin, every single Republican [in Congress] would say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and vote for it.” Reid’s remark came during her interview with Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Minority Leader of the House of Representatives. Jeffries had just indicated that all it would take is three House Republicans to vote with Democrats in order to do the right thing for the American people they represent. You can watch the exchange here. Just five days before Reid’s staff learned that her show had been cancelled – by reading about it first in leaked media reports and then having the fact confirmed by management – Trump and … Continue reading →