By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2025 ~
President Donald Trump Tells Fox News that Americans Would End Up Poor Without His Brain in the White House
The President of the United States appears to be on a mission to Make Corruption Great Again.
Just yesterday, Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Also, Trump issued a pardon to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted in 2011 on corruption charges, including an FBI-recorded attempt to sell the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated when Barack Obama took the office of the President. Trump had commuted Blagojevich’s sentence during his first term as President.
In a further jaw-dropping move yesterday, Trump issued an Executive Order that suspends the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days, giving a greenlight to megabanks on Wall Street and other 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.
Two of the megabanks on Wall Street – Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase – had previously been charged with outrageously brazen violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). (See here and here.)
The FCPA has been the law of the United States for almost half a century. It was enacted in 1977 and protects the reputations of giant publicly-traded companies in the U.S., the stock of many of which are held to the tune of billions of dollars in public pension funds. It also supports the reputation of the United States as a country that will not allow its largest corporations to engage in predatory practices against vulnerable countries through bribery.
Trump’s moves yesterday to normalize corruption are being interpreted by some media outlets as an effort by Trump to normalize his own history of corruption as simply what smart dealmakers do. Trump is, after all, the first convicted felon (a 34-count convicted felon to be precise) to serve as President of the United States in 248 years.
Trump’s unprecedented moves since taking office just last month are ringing more and more alarm bells. Trump has stunned the world at large with his announcement last Tuesday that the U.S. would take ownership of Gaza, the homeland of the Palestinian people, and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump expanded on that in an interview with Fox News, portions of which were released yesterday. In that interview, Trump said the Palestinians would not be allowed to return to Gaza.
From firing Inspectors General, to shuttering federal agencies, to allowing the unprecedented breaches of U.S. government payment and computer systems, to appointing grossly disqualified individuals to lead critical federal agencies, Trump is increasingly appearing to be destabilizing the U.S. government.
Yesterday, five former U.S. Treasury Secretaries (Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Jack Lew and Janet Yellen) jointly penned an OpEd at the New York Times. In it, they wrote the following about Elon Musk and his band of young techies gaining access to the U.S. Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system:
“These political actors have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants, and one has explicitly retained his role in a private company, creating at best the appearance of financial conflicts of interest. They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data — like Social Security numbers and bank account information. Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries. And our critical infrastructure is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care. That is why a federal judge this past weekend blocked, at least temporarily, these individuals from the Treasury’s payments system, noting the risk of ‘irreparable harm.’ ”
One member of Congress who appears to have sized up the machinations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his 19-25 year old tech bros running amok in the computer systems of critical federal agencies is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
When the news of the mass firings of Inspectors General by Trump made their way to Whitehouse, he summed up the Trump agenda with one sentence at X (formerly Twitter):
“Corruption 101: Clear out the cops before you send in the thieves.”
Over the weekend, another cop has been gutted by the Trump administration in a brazen coup d’état. The building of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been shuttered for at least this week, its government website gives a 404 error notice, and its major operations have been suspended by a Trump appointee, Russell Vought (a key author of Project 2025), who has also been installed as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
The CFPB was created in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, duly passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama. It allows average Americans to file complaints directly with the CFPB against financial institutions that have ripped them off. That complaint database is publicly available and allows journalists to mine it, looking for the latest predatory actions against vulnerable Americans. Taking down the CFPB has been on Wall Street’s wish list since its creation.
Senate and House Democrats funneled their outrage against the Trump administration’s unlawful actions against the CFPB in a quickly launched protest rally in front of its shuttered building yesterday.
