By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2017 Millions of Americans have quietly been pondering for months what a President Mike Pence would be like should Donald Trump be impeached or resign. Yesterday they found out and it’s not a pretty picture. After the U.S. Senate tied 50-50 on a vote yesterday, Vice President Mike Pence cast the deciding vote to keep the nation’s courthouse doors closed to the customers of the Too-Big-to-Fail banks on Wall Street – effectively strengthening the no law zone that already exists for these banks. The vote came about as a result of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issuing its final rule in July which would allow consumers who have been defrauded in financial transactions involving credit cards and bank accounts to have access to file a group action (known legally as a “class action”) using the nation’s courts. The CFPB was created … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2017 Matthew Garrahan dropped a bigger bombshell in the Financial Times yesterday than even he realizes. Garrahan named the law firm that had crafted a gag order in 1998 to silence two women from ever speaking about their encounters with Harvey Weinstein. One woman, Zelda Perkins, was an assistant to Weinstein in London and charged him with egregious sexual harassment. The other unnamed female colleague charged Weinstein with sexual assault. The two were paid $125,000 each and given an iron-clad gag order. The terms of the gag order were so confidential that the women were not even allowed to have a full copy of what they had agreed to, just a summary of some of its terms. The law firm representing Weinstein with the settlements and gag orders (officially called non-disclosure agreements) was Allen & Overy – the London derivatives powerhouse that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2017 Over the past month, with little media attention, both Citigroup and Merrill Lynch have received fines from regulatory bodies for failure to properly report their trading in derivatives – an opaque trading arena that played a significant role in bringing down both firms during the financial crisis. As reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2011, Citigroup received $2.5 trillion in cumulative, secret low cost loans from the Federal Reserve during the 2007-2010 financial crisis while Merrill received $1.9 trillion. These loans, many at almost zero interest rates, were made without the authorization or awareness of Congress. (See GAO chart below.) The loans to the two firms were on top of the publicly disclosed and Congress-approved TARP bailout funds. Significant portions of the money loaned to Citigroup and Merrill Lynch were authorized by the Federal Reserve to be funneled to the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2017  Last week Jim Rutenberg penned a column for the New York Times titled Facing Down the Network that Produced Harvey Weinstein. Rutenberg explored the reasons that Weinstein’s decades of sexually harassing women and charges of assaults had not made it to the front pages of newspapers sooner. Correctly calling it “something akin to a protection racket,” Rutenberg defined it as a “network of aggressive public relations flacks and lawyers who guard the secrets of those who employ them and keep their misdeeds out of public view.” That sentence brought to mind a 2009 Rachel Maddow program on MSNBC where she enumerated the ignominious historical milestones of the monster public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, capping the history by calling it the “p.r. firm from hell.” Among her litany of its p.r. projects, Maddow cited: “…when Blackwater killed those 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, they … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2017 America has now been through various iterations of “it’s time to stop bashing Wall Street” by writers who seem to easily get air time or plenty of print space to make their case. An OpEd in the New York Times today is the latest in this endless series. We’ll get to that column shortly, but first some necessary background. Wall Street did not accidentally run a barge aground and leave a small oil slick on the Hudson River. Wall Street did not accidentally release tainted lettuce that sickened a few dozen people. What Wall Street did was intentional and criminal: it financially engineered a toxic subprime house of cards which it knew from its own internal reviews was going to collapse; it then molded the toxic product into inscrutable bundles; it sold the bundles to unsuspecting investors around the globe while … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2017 In 2013, when a division of CIT served as a joint lead arranger for a $370 million senior secured credit facility to the Weinstein Company, an executive of the lender, Kevin Khanna, issued a statement effusively praising the management of the Weinstein Company, stating: “The Weinstein Co. is one of the premier Hollywood studios in the world and we are pleased to further expand our relationship with them through this recent financing. As a key player in the film financing sector, we pride ourselves in putting our knowledge to work on behalf of our clients to help them achieve their goals.” Today, the Weinstein Company stands as the premier poster boy for mismanagement of its brand, reputation and franchise as sexual assault and sexual harassment charges, stretching over three decades, have been lodged against its co-founder and key executive, Harvey Weinstein. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 16, 2017 Hurricanes, wildfires, the multiple investigations of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election and the calamity-du-jour in the Trump White House are gobbling up an outsized share of digital and print news pages at corporate media. What’s gone missing is intrepid, in-depth investigations of Wall Street’s latest scam against the public – even at corporate media outlets purporting to focus on Wall Street. Consider today’s front page of the Wall Street Journal: there’s an article on health care; central banks and stimulus; Iraqi forces and Kurdish fighters; how Blackstone Group is on the prowl for retail investors; and a curious report on long-haul truckers cooking up jambalaya and Thai peanut pork (you can’t make this stuff up). There is nothing about an investigation of a mega Wall Street bank; the dangers these behemoths continue to pose to taxpayers and the U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2017 Donald Trump, the President of the United States, who took his companies through bankruptcy six times, picked the three-week anniversary of Hurricane Maria delivering an epic humanitarian crisis to Puerto Rico to shame the U.S. territory for its financial troubles and to traumatize the struggling residents by suggesting he may yank Federal workers from Puerto Rico. The President, whose key job is to rally people in the time of crisis, posted the following, insanely cruel Tweet yesterday to a region where 84 percent of the residents still lack electrical power; one-third lack clean running water; and only 8 percent of the roads are passable according to government statistics: “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!” Trump posted to his Twitter page. That post came shortly after Trump retweeted a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 12, 2017 President Donald Trump has developed a kind of Twitter art form for disparaging U.S. media as “Fake News.” But even before Trump was elected President and assumed the mantle of media-basher-in-chief, corporate-owned media had lost the confidence of a vast majority of Americans. A Gallup poll released on September 14 of last year found that “Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media ‘to report the news fully, accurately and fairly’ has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media.” The poll showed a drop of eight percentage points from the same poll conducted in 2015. Now, as the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault articles continues to play out, both NBC and the New York Times have come under fire for allegedly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2017  In May 2011, a New York grand jury indicted the powerful former head of the International Monetary Fund and the man presumed by many to be on his way to becoming the next President of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The indictment stemmed from allegations that he had sexually assaulted a maid, Nafissatou Diallo, in his hotel suite in New York. But then Strauss-Kahn unleashed his powerful legal team and global PR firm and by August the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, had dropped the case. (See our prior coverage here and here.) Strauss-Kahn, known as DSK, had much in common at the time with the Harvey Weinstein matter today. DSK was a powerful man with powerful political friends. He had lawyers and a major PR firm ready to spring into action over allegations of  being a sexual predator when they arose. Now, … Continue reading →