Search Results for: kavanaugh

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 23, 2022 ~ Caitlin Long is the founder and CEO of a crypto startup called Custodia Bank, previously known as Avanti Financial Group. Custodia is allowed to call itself a “bank” – despite the fact that it does not have FDIC insurance on deposits – because of a 2019 law in Wyoming that allows Custodia to operate as a Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI). The lack of federal insurance on bank deposits and Wall Street’s wild speculations are what led to thousands of banks going belly up following the 1929 stock market crash. Wyoming has become to crypto what the state of Delaware is to corporate secrecy – a very friendly venue. Since 2018, Wyoming has passed a flurry of laws to effectively roll out the red carpet to crypto startups and their army of lobbyists. The University of Wyoming even offers a Minor … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 5, 2022 ~ During my career in finance, I had the privilege to work for A.G. Edwards, a century old Wall Street firm led at the time by Ben Franklin Edwards III, the fifth generation of the Edwards family to steward the company. Once, when Edwards was visiting our branch in New York, he shared with us his philosophy on how to deal with a rogue broker. He said he would use a scalpel to remove him from the organization, making sure to get any cancer he might have spread. What kind of cancer could a crooked broker spread? Just think about how Bernie Madoff corrupted everything he touched: his accountants; his IT staff who cooked up fake client statements; his brother, Peter Madoff, who ridiculously served as his Chief Compliance Officer; and even the bank that held his business account, JPMorgan Chase, whose reputation was severely … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 15, 2021 ~ Last Wednesday, March 10, a Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing of critical importance to every American on the growing tsunami of dark money that is corrupting the U.S court system, up to, and including, the U.S. Supreme Court. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has written extensively on the corrupting influence of dark money on American democracy, chairs that Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. One would have thought that every major print and broadcast news outlet would have covered that hearing. Instead, the silence was deafening and smacked of censorship. The one peep that was heard from a major news outlet was a snarky attack on Whitehouse himself on the day of the hearing by the corporatized, right-wing Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, part of the Rupert Murdoch empire. The “Editorial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 5, 2018 ~ Add the stock market to the growing list of things that are not normal in the U.S. We’ll get to the details of yesterday’s appearance of a rigged market in a moment, but first a small sampling of the other abnormal ways the U.S. is currently functioning. The U.S. has a President and Commander-in-Chief who is credibly accused by his own lawyer of engaging in political campaign fraud by paying hush money to women whose stories could have impacted the 2016 presidential election. The same President is credibly accused by the New York Times of engaging in tax fraud. That same man is also the subject of a criminal probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And yet, Donald Trump is allowed to nominate a judge who will sit on the highest court in the land for a lifetime – a man who is, like … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 3, 2018 ~ On August 14, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, tweeted that an African-American woman he had previously hired to work in the White House, Omarosa Manigault Newman, is a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.”  In any other executive job in America, those published words would be grounds for immediate dismissal. Yesterday, while attending a political rally in Mississippi, that same President mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the courageous professor who gave sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27 that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17. Dr. Ford also submitted to the Senate the results of the lie detector test that she had passed and affidavits from four people she had told about the assault in earlier years. Trump mocked Dr. Ford’s sexual assault testimony … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2018 ~  Just days before President Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Monday evening, a dark money group called the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) was airing a television ad calling some of the most trusted  Democrats “extremists.” As photos of Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley flashed across the screen (along with other well known Democrats) a voice warned that these “extremists will lie and attack the nominee.” One thing this threesome actually stands out for is telling the hard truths to the American people. During his presidential bid in 2016, Sanders traveled around the country telling tens of thousands of people at his rallies that the “business model of Wall Street is fraud.” Warren exposed the $6 trillion in a backdoor bailout that the Federal Reserve had funneled secretly to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch during … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2018 ~ There is something revoltingly un-American about a man who stands with his wife and two young daughters to accept the nomination for the highest court in America, talks about feeding the homeless and coaching girls’ basketball – all the while knowing that a lot of very dirty corporate money lurks in the shadows of his nomination. We’re talking about the fact that Trump made his Supreme Court nominee selection of Brett Kavanaugh from a list that was pre-approved by the Federalist Society – a receptacle for the dark money that flows from the billionaire Charles Koch’s network of corporate polluters and democracy-killing front groups that got the Supreme Court to rubber stamp unlimited corporate money in political campaigns via the Citizens United decision in 2010. According to the Desmog, using data compiled by the Conservative Transparency project, Donors Trust and Donors … Continue reading →