By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2016 Craig Timberg, a Washington Post reporter with an interesting history (which we’ll get to shortly), doubled down last night with a new article suggesting that Congressional legislation may be coming to further crack down on independent journalists not properly adhering to the dogma of Washington. Timberg has become the deserving piñata of writers like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Max Blumenthal of AlterNet, Robert Parry at Common Dreams and numerous other writers at alternative media. Timberg and the Washington Post, which is owned by the billionaire CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, are being stridently called out as McCarthyites for an article published on Thanksgiving Day that cited unnamed “experts” at a shadowy group called PropOrNot to smear 200 alternative media sites as tools of Russia. The blacklist included some of the most informed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2016 Two days ago, a former Citigroup employee, Erin Daly, filed a 27-page lawsuit in Federal Court in Manhattan alleging gender discrimination and unlawful termination. On the same day, November 28, Daly simultaneously filed a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging she was retaliated against by Citigroup after she reported “violations of insider trading laws” to lawyers at the bank. It is illegal for U.S. banks to retaliate against whistleblowers. According to the Federal lawsuit, less than two weeks after Daly reported the insider trading law violations to internal lawyers, she was terminated from the bank. These are extremely serious charges against a mega Wall Street bank that would have gone belly up in 2008 had it not received $45 billion in equity infusions from the taxpayer, over $300 billion in asset guarantees from the government and more than $2.5 trillion … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 29, 2016 On Sunday, November 13, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen K. Bannon as his Senior Counselor and Chief Strategist in the White House. Newspapers across America focused on Bannon’s background as an executive at the right-wing Breitbart News. But Bannon’s more revealing role is that of a seasoned propaganda filmmaker, churning out documentaries that target liberals as haters of America while his films are actually being financed by billionaires who like their plutocracy just the way it is. On September 21, 2012, less than two months before the Presidential election, a Bannon documentary titled “Occupy Unmasked” was released in select theaters in an effort to discredit the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Breitbart web site urged its followers to create “buzz” about the film. Writing at The Nation, Michael Tracey called the film “a deranged hodge-podge of bizarre memes, wild dot-connecting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 28, 2016 As we reported on November 20, three of the men associated with Citizens United, the right-wing organization that took the legal case to the U.S. Supreme Court that ushered in today’s unprecedented era of unlimited corporate money in U.S. elections, took key posts in the Donald Trump campaign beginning this past summer. One of the men, Stephen K. Bannon, has been named by President-elect Trump to be his Senior Counselor and Chief Strategist in the White House. While Bannon is widely cited for his executive role at Breitbart News prior to joining the Trump campaign, he is also the long-tenured, right-wing filmmaker for the Citizens United organization. A number of the films made by Bannon list Lawrence Kadish as Executive Producer and Victory Film Group as an affiliated entity involved in the documentaries. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 20, 2016 Citizens United, the nonprofit organization that brought the U.S. Supreme Court case that has unleashed unlimited corporate spending in elections, sent three of its top strategists to run the Donald Trump campaign in its floundering days of 2016. Here’s the timeline: On July 11, 2016, the Trump campaign announced that it had “enlisted the services of Bryan Lanza, who will serve as the Deputy Communications Director for Surrogates. Mr. Lanza’s focus will be on organizing and mobilizing Trump supporters in an effective way that allows Mr. Trump’s America First message to resonate with voters.” Lanza came from Citizens United where he had been Communications Director. On August 17, 2016, the New York Times reported that Steve Bannon would become Chief Executive of the Trump campaign. The article focused on Bannon’s role at Breitbart News but Bannon was the long-tenured filmmaker for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 18, 2016  “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” a reality tv show, has some stiff competition coming from network news as it reports on the daily churn of the Trump Transition Team, which is providing enough intrigue for a thrice daily soap opera. At 6:37 a.m. on Wednesday, three NBC reporters announced that Donald Trump had “taken the unprecedented step of requesting his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, receive top-secret clearance to join him for his Presidential Daily Briefings.” By mid-morning Wednesday, the New York Times was denying the rumor. But by evening, ABC News was reporting that the “intelligence community” had confirmed the story to its reporters. Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. He is 35 years old, has no intelligence background, no current security clearances, and is the publisher of a New York City-based newspaper, The New York Observer. A newspaper publisher is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 17, 2016 After a humiliating election loss just eight days earlier, the Wall Street Democrats in the U.S. Senate laid the groundwork for another humiliating defeat in the midterms in 2018 by electing Senator Chuck Schumer to be the Senate Minority Leader. Schumer is considered the poster boy for Wall Street — as their mouthpiece for lax regulation and a reliable Senate confirmation vote for Wall Street cronies to lead regulatory agencies. Over the past five years, Schumer has raised over $25.8 million for his campaign committee and Leadership PAC with the leading donors being security and investments firms and their outside law firms, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Schumer’s top ten largest donors over his entire political career include seven major Wall Street banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, UBS and the now defunct Bear … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 16, 2016 The only thing standing between the American people and another apocalyptic financial collapse among by the biggest banks on Wall Street is the Federal Reserve’s stress tests and capital requirements. After Wall Street laid waste to the U.S. housing market and economy from 2008 through 2010, while propping itself back up with a feeding tube from the taxpayers’ pocketbook, the Obama administration passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010.  It wasn’t so much legislation as it was an illusory 2300 pages of rules that might someday get implemented in a meaningful way if President Obama appointed tough cops to his financial regulatory bodies – which he decidedly did not do. One of the promises in Dodd-Frank was that the Federal Reserve would annually assess whether the biggest and most dangerous banks have adequate capital to withstand a severe recession and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 15, 2016 The corrupt and collapsing two-party political system in the U.S. is coming under renewed attack by the young generation.  Trump Tower in New York City, where Republican President-elect Donald Trump is holed up, has become a veritable police fortress at street level with much of the sidewalk area barricaded from pedestrian traffic. Progressive protesters have been regularly massing outside of the building since Trump’s win in the presidential election on November 8. Many of their posters read: “Not My President.” But yesterday, young progressive protesters targeted the Capitol Hill office of a sitting Democratic Senator, Chuck Schumer of New York. As two of his clerks attempted to look unruffled and busied themselves behind their computers, about two dozen young people marched into Schumer’s office singing this song: “We are standing for our future, we are hearing what is wrong, we are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 14, 2016 Rudy Giuliani is said to be under serious consideration by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Department of Justice as Attorney General. There are a number of serious problems with Giuliani serving in this post, including his track record of stomping on the Bill of Rights and his employment as a law partner with Greenberg Traurig, a corporate law firm with a long history of lobbying for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to weaken protections for the average citizen. During Rudy Giuliani’s two terms as Mayor of New York City, from 1993 through 2001, he was sued 30 times by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the state affiliate of the ACLU. Of those 30 lawsuits, the NYCLU won 27 of the cases. (See Editor’s note below on her own case that was successfully challenged in court against the … Continue reading →