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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2025 ~ Elon Musk is the billionaire CEO of the publicly-traded EV company, Tesla. As such, under corporate law, he owes a Duty of Loyalty to Tesla. Notwithstanding this well-established law, Musk is engaged in an array of other corporate endeavors outside of Tesla, including being the CEO of SpaceX, a private rocket company. SpaceX is a major federal contractor to NASA and the Department of Defense. See our report: The U.S. Government Is Plowing Billions into SpaceX, Overlooking Drug Use, Sex Parties, and Elon Musk’s Coziness with Putin. Now, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and a host of other media outlets are reporting that Musk has used his 2-week old position as the head of a Donald Trump faux agency – the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – which Trump created out of thin air last month by Executive … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2025 ~ The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has gotten its hands on a blockbuster 35-page letter that a former JPMorgan banker sent to the bank’s Audit Committee of the Board of Directors in August 2023. The letter asserts that the bank has been ginning down the amount of capital it is required to hold by improperly using an accounting technique called “netting.” The whistleblower asserts that “this could have allowed JPMorgan Chase to generate an additional $2 billion in net income in one year alone.” The whistleblower indicates that he/she brought this alleged malfeasance to bank officials in 2018 but was “ultimately retaliated against and laid off in 2022.” That is becoming a common refrain by whistleblowers inside JPMorgan Chase: they say they are rewarded for bringing improper, or brazenly illegal, conduct to the attention of their superiors by being shown the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2025 ~ We’ll get to Google’s AI Search model shortly, but first some necessary background. Like many of you, we spent a good part of our day yesterday reading up on DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that purports to have built an AI model that rivals U.S. industry leaders like OpenAI and Google – for a mere fraction of the cost. On Monday, the news that DeepSeek’s AI model might have rendered most of those sophisticated and expensive chips from Nvidia obsolete shaved $600 billion off the market value of Nvidia – the largest one-day dollar loss in a stock in U.S. market history. Adding to the nervousness, DeepSeek has made its AI model open-source, meaning its base code is publicly available for tech geeks in the U.S. and around the world to examine and build on. Also bringing out the worry beads in Silicon … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 28, 2025 ~ Last Friday night, when federal employees thought they could escape to a weekend of relief from Donald Trump’s rewriting of the Constitution by Executive Edict, emails went out to at least 16 Inspectors General – the fraud and abuse watchdogs of Federal agencies – informing  them that they were terminated “immediately,” without citing any grounds for dismissal, a legal requirement since 2022. What is particularly strange about the mass firings is that many of these IGs were appointed by Trump himself in his first term as President, raising the suspicion that Trump’s current demands for personal loyalty have taken an even darker turn in Trump 2.0. Mark Lee Greenblatt, the IG of the Interior Department (which Trump now seems eager to sacrifice to the fossil fuel industry) took to LinkedIn on Saturday to express his reaction to being fired as a government … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2025 ~ On October 21, 2020, during Donald Trump’s first term as President, former President Barack Obama delivered a speech at a Democratic campaign rally in Philadelphia. During the remarks, Obama got to the core of how the fossil fuel industry had shaped the Trump administration. He stated: “The Environmental Protection Agency, that’s supposed to protect our air and our water, is right now run by an energy lobbyist that gives polluters free reign to dump unlimited poison into our air and water… “The Interior Department, that’s supposed to protect our public lands and wild spaces, our wildlife and our wilderness. And right now, that’s run by an oil lobbyist who’s determined to sell them to the highest bidder.” During Trump’s first term, the fossil fuels industry and particularly Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, were brazen in … Continue reading →