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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2025 ~ The crypto billionaires who played a major role in putting Donald Trump in the White House and defeating the reelection of honest Senators who had sat on the Senate Banking Committee, were celebrating their big wins at the Crypto Ball last Friday night at the gilded Mellon Auditorium just down the street from the White House, when they were blindsided by a Tweet from President-elect Donald Trump. The Tweet delivered the bombshell news that Trump – two days away from being sworn in as President of the United States — had just launched his own crypto coin: “My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to http://gettrumpmemes.com — Have Fun!” Numerous attendees at the Ball thought this was such over-the-top grift, even for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2025 ~ Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, celebrated his 60th birthday on January 15 by providing ludicrous answers during his Senate confirmation hearing. The periodic screams and outbursts from activists in the hearing room punctuated the Orwellian proceedings. At one point a young woman leapt to her feet and screamed out: “I’m 18 years old and I want a future!” Screams of “LA is burning” erupted periodically. Other activists held up bright yellow signs with bold black lettering that read: “Big oil profits, LA burns.” All disruptors were quickly escorted from the hearing room by Capitol Police. The young activists had good cause to be outraged. As their fellow citizens in Los Angeles return to the smoldering ruins of thousands of homes destroyed by 100 mile per hour winds and dry brush fueling raging wildfires … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 15, 2025 ~ The cognizant dissonance of watching scandal-ridden Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth stonewall his way through a Senate confirmation hearing yesterday for the job of Secretary of Defense, as thousands of homes smolder in ruins in the suburbs of Los Angeles from a failure of the U.S. to properly address climate change, has a common thread – dark money from the fossil fuel industry. The science-fiction like world Americans now wake to each morning, which is set to become ever more surreal in five days, with 34-count convicted felon Donald Trump assuming the Presidency of the United States, is the product of four decades of the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial octopus of front groups. Two groups funded with fossil fuel money, the Heritage Foundation and American Leadership PAC are separately running ads pushing U.S. Senators to confirm Hegseth. (Watch the ads … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2025 ~ Most retirees have a significant part of their net worth in their homes. Until recent years, it was reasonable to assume that if you kept your home in good repair, your home would be standing for multiple generations. But as we learned from the impact of Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic rain events in North Carolina in September of last year, and from the ongoing devastating fires around Los Angeles today, a wood frame (a/k/a “stick-built”) home can be turned into a pile of smoldering rubble with little time to escape in this era of climate-change hellscapes. The main problem for Western North Carolina in September wasn’t wind speed – but over two feet of rainfall in some areas over three days that transformed scenic rivers into raging beasts that leveled homes, entire towns, roads, bridges, water mains and left some electric utility substations … Continue reading →