Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2018 ~ Southwest Key Programs first gained national media attention when Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon traveled to Brownsville, Texas on June 3 and attempted to enter one of its Federally-funded facilities to check on the immigrant children who had been forcibly taken from their parents under a Trump administration policy called “zero tolerance.” Southwest Key called the police on Merkley and denied him entry. Under the policy that was fully implemented in early May by the Trump administration, even immigrant parents fleeing violence in Central America, with a previous lawful right to seek an asylum application in the U.S., were being incarcerated and having their children and infants as young as three months old forcibly taken from them. Over 2,000 children currently remain separated from their parents as a result of this policy. After enormous public outcry and medical professionals stepping forward … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 21, 2018 ~ This past week has seen the worst of an American President in modern history and the best of America’s free press. From MSNBC’s almost non-stop coverage of the child abuse inherent in Trump’s policy to incarcerate children and take infants as young as three months old from their immigrant parents at the U.S. southern border to ProPublica’s release of the stunning tape recording of crying, traumatized children calling out for their “Moma” and “Papa” inside a “tender age” detention center, to searing newspaper editorials and OpEds, it has been a week where we can take courage from the fact that America’s press cannot be bullied into the cult-like submission to Trump that has engulfed so many of the Republican members of Congress. Above and below, we highlight three of the media graphics that have accompanied this invigorated search for America’s soul … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 21, 2018 ~ Over the past 24 hours, everyone from the Pope to Fox TV producers to foreign leaders like U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May to top corporate CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook to U.S. airlines (who learned they had unwittingly transported snatched children hundreds of miles away from their parents) spoke out in condemnation of President Donald Trump’s inhumane policy to forcibly remove children and toddlers and babies as young as three months old from their immigrant parents attempting to enter the United States at our southern border. In many of these cases, the parents were attempting to pursue asylum applications after fleeing deadly gang violence in their central American country. The outcry and repulsion of this policy of taking children from their lawful parents, without due process, and incarcerating them in internment camp conditions reached a fever pitch yesterday with longtime … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 20, 2018 ~ General Electric Co. (GE) will be unceremoniously sacked from the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 26, it was announced yesterday by the S&P Dow Jones Indices folks. GE was one of the original 12 companies in the index when it was created in 1896. The Dow now consists of 30 companies and GE has been in the index continuously since 1907. Curiously, GE – an industrial giant that makes highly sophisticated commercial jet engines for Boeing and turbines for power plants among numerous other lines of business – will be replaced in the Dow by a retail drugstore chain, Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA). GE’s exit from the Dow has a lot of the same hallmarks as the exit of Citigroup from the Dow. Citigroup got the same one-week notice that GE is getting. The announcement came on June 1, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 19, 2018 ~  According to Dr. Colleen Kraft, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. President of the United States, Donald Trump, is deploying a policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. southern border that is tantamount to child abuse. Speaking on CBS News (see video below), Dr. Kraft said when she visited a detention facility for separated children in Texas she saw a toddler girl “sobbing, wailing and beating her little fists on the mat.” She said staff there are told they are not allowed to hold a child to comfort them when they are crying. Dr. Kraft explained that what this kind of emotional stress can do to a child is “disrupt the synapses and the neurological connections that are part of the developing brain.” When asked if the children can recover from this kind of trauma, Dr. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2018 ~  Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously said in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis that he was “doing God’s work.” What Goldman Sachs was actually doing in secret at that time was receiving billions of dollars in undisclosed loans from the Federal Reserve – often at the insanely low interest rate of .01 percent. Goldman was also living off billions of dollars in publicly acknowledged taxpayer bailouts, while paying out obscene bonuses to its executives, including those who had shorted (made bets against) the U.S. housing market as it collapsed into the greatest disaster since the Great Depression. (See related articles below.) Last week we received an unsolicited direct mail offer from Goldman Sachs. It was offering us the ability to borrow a personal loan ranging from $3500 to $40,000 with rates ranging from 6.99 to 24.99 percent. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2018 ~  On Monday Reuters reported that “a judge in Mexico has issued an arrest warrant for the country head of U.S. investment bank JPMorgan for alleged fraud….” Details about the arrest warrant were provided the same day in a lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit explained that “…a prosecutor has conducted a criminal investigation into fraud by J.P. Morgan. Based on the preliminary evidence collected, the prosecutor recently (in June 2018) requested that a judge detain Eduardo Cepeda, the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Defendant’s Mexican unit, and former J.P. Morgan managing director Miguel Barbosa. Upon review of the evidence presented by the prosecutor, a criminal court judge has found the elements of felony fraud in the amount of $100 million, and issued a detention order for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2018 ~ Finance Professor John Griffin and fellow researcher Amin Shams, both at the University of Texas, released a study yesterday that is causing alarm bells to ring for investors in Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Titled “Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?” the researchers found strong evidence that Tether, another digital currency, is being used to artificially support the price of Bitcoin when it comes under selling pressure. Griffin and Shams found further that “Tether seems to be used both to stabilize and manipulate Bitcoin prices.” Bitcoin soared over 1400 percent last year but has been selling off this year. It’s lost about 70 percent from the peak it set last year. The researchers write: “To illustrate the potential magnitude and predictive effect of Tether issuances on Bitcoin prices, we focus on the hours with the largest lagged combined Bitcoin and Tether flows on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 13, 2018 ~  Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) quietly dropped a bomb on the relationship that the behemoth Wall Street firm Merrill Lynch has with its institutional clients. For those willing to skip past the timid press release from the SEC and dig carefully through the Administrative Proceeding Order, there was this startling revelation: Merrill Lynch had charged obscene markups (profits for the house) on bond trades over a three and a half-year period that were in two cases cited 23 times and 3 times the industry prescribed legal limit of less than 5 percent. Merrill Lynch agreed to settle the charges by paying $10.5 million in disgorgement to its ripped-off customers and to pay penalties of $5.2 million to the SEC. Merrill Lynch is best known as a firm with 15,000 brokers (financial advisors) in branch offices across the United … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2018 ~ Last Friday, Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics columnist at the Washington Post, penned an in-depth article on the hubris of stock buybacks and the role they are playing in retarding future growth of the U.S. economy as well as fueling the next debt implosion. That dire warning was followed yesterday by equally ominous remarks delivered at the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, by newly appointed SEC Commissioner Robert J. Jackson, Jr. (Jackson was appointed by President Trump to fill a Democratic seat on the SEC.) Pearlstein outlined the looming problem as follows: “Last year, public companies spent more than $800 billion buying back their own shares and, thanks to all the cash freed up by the recent tax bill, Goldman Sachs estimates that share buybacks will surge to $1.2 trillion this year. That comes … Continue reading →