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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 21, 2025 ~ Donald Trump loyalists, including Elon Musk and his “Muskrats,” (coders and techies that are loyal to Musk) have launched an unconstitutional reign of terror through federal agencies that are critical to the safety and security of Americans. Musk is the world’s wealthiest man, and foreign born, with a dubious history when it comes to following U.S. laws. Musk previously battled in court to obtain a $56 billion pay package at Tesla. (That’s billion not million.) Tesla is a publicly-traded company and Musk is its CEO – meaning that under law he owes an oath of loyalty to the company and its shareholders. Notwithstanding that law, Musk simultaneously serves as CEO of rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, and controls numerous other companies, including the social media platform, Twitter, which Musk has renamed “X.” In January and February of last year, Musk was profiled in two bombshell Wall Street Journal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 19, 2025 ~ Something is seriously wrong in the House of Dimon – also known as JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. Barron’s, part of the Dow Jones Company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, has released an audio of the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, dropping F-bombs in a profanity-laced tirade during a Town Hall with his employees last Wednesday. We carefully transcribed a portion of that audio. Dimon said this: “We also had—and you know I’m right about this one—a lot of you on the f***ing Zoom and you were doing the following, okay: looking at your mail; sending texts to each other about what an a**hole the other person is, okay; not paying attention; not reading your stuff, you know. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness — it does. Okay.” Apparently, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 18, 2025 ~ The Government Accountability Office (GAO) turned 100 years old in 2021. For more than a century it has been doing the work that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pretending to do, that is, competently root out fraud, waste and abuse in federal government programs without leaving a dangerous trail of chaos that threatens national security, personal privacy and the U.S. Constitution. If Elon Musk is sincerely interested in efficiency and government savings, why is he duplicating the work of the non-partisan GAO – while doing it in a grossly subpar and deeply conflicted manner? Thanks to two sitting U.S. Senators, the American people are going to get an investigation by the GAO into exactly what went down when DOGE accessed the U.S. Treasury’s payment system and gained access to highly confidential records of private American citizens. (Yesterday, the Associated … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 13, 2025 ~ Yesterday, the newly formed House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) held its first hearing titled: “The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud.” The Subcommittee appears to be part of an echo chamber attempting to bring legitimacy to President Donald Trump tapping his largest campaign donor, billionaire Elon Musk, to lead an effort to gut federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies and create enough savings to give tax breaks and other perks to the ultra-rich. Musk should be immediately disqualified from any such watchdog role for the following reasons: he effectively put Trump over the election finish line, giving $288 million to PACs or Super PACs supporting Trump; the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported that Musk has been communicating with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022, notwithstanding the fact that Musk’s company SpaceX is a U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2025 ~ 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 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2025 ~ It was just two years ago that bold headlines were swirling around the world that young techies with degrees from top American universities had engineered one of the most brazen frauds in U.S. history, including building a backdoor to a computer system that allowed billions of dollars to be looted from customer accounts at crypto exchange FTX. Despite this recent reminder that anyone with access to large sums of other people’s money requires constant and competent policing, President Donald Trump has allowed the insanely greedy Elon Musk to send young techies into the U.S. Treasury Department and access its $6 trillion payment systems. The tech news website, Wired, has provided in-depth coverage of insider allegations that one of those Musk techies, Marko Elez, was given administrative access, meaning that he could write and alter code in the Treasury payment system. Last Tuesday, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2025 ~ Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is more alert to the threat of fascism than most Americans. His father fled Nazi Germany at age 18. Blumenthal also knows exponentially more than the average American about the threat of criminal conspiracies to national security: He’s a Yale Law grad and previously worked as the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut as its U.S. Attorney in the Department of Justice. Unfortunately for Elon Musk, one of the most conflicted and inappropriate corporate CEOs on the planet to be given access by Donald Trump to the U.S. Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system (along with his equally conflicted team of 19-25 year old lackeys), Blumenthal is also the Ranking Member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). For those unfamiliar with just how deeply PSI has the ability to dig, consider the 300-page report that PSI delivered on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2025 ~ Donald Trump has placed a man with no prior government experience, Scott Bessent, in charge of overseeing a sprawling network of federal agencies that are tasked with operating and protecting the financial system of the United States. What did Bessent do previously to qualify for this powerful position? He ran a hedge fund, Key Square Capital Management LLC, with 25 employees. But, more important to the transactional world of Donald Trump, Bessent gave $1.25 million to PACs supporting Trump and tens of thousands of dollars to state and national Republican parties and candidates. Bessent was sworn in as U.S. Treasury Secretary on January 28. In that position, Bessent sits at the helm of a federal agency that includes the IRS; the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates national banks; the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (of U.S. currency); … Continue reading →