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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2025 ~ The indefatigable Dennis Kelleher, Co-Founder and CEO of the Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, has just released his organization’s monthly newsletter for January 2025 and it’s a humdinger. Kelleher warns that the financial deregulators that incoming President Donald Trump has packed into his administration means “that the clock is ticking on a coming catastrophic financial crash that will likely be much worse than 2008.” Kelleher adds that this “is not hyperbole.” He cites evidence from past financial crashes, writing: “…there is always a lag after deregulation and the creation of artificial liquidity. That was true for ‘roaring ‘20s’ followed by the crash and Great Depression; the ‘great moderation’ of the early 2000s followed by the crash and Great Recession; the deregulation of the first Trump administration in 2017-2020 that led to the 2023 banking crisis when 3 of the 4 largest bank failures … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2025 ~ On July 31, 2023 the World Health Organization released a report on cigarette smoking. It noted the following: “The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing over 8 million people a year around the world. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.3 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. “All forms of tobacco use are harmful, and there is no safe level of exposure to tobacco…. “Around 80% of the 1.3 billion tobacco users worldwide live in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest. Tobacco use contributes to poverty by diverting household spending from basic needs such as food and shelter to tobacco. This spending behaviour is difficult to curb because tobacco is so addictive.” Despite awareness for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2025 ~ There is a precise date as to when the American public became overtly aware that the stock market structure had become outrageously rigged. That date is March 30, 2014 when famed author and former Wall Street veteran, Michael Lewis, went on 60 Minutes to proclaim: “The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.” When asked to explain just who it is that’s rigging the stock market, Lewis explained that it’s a “combination of these stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks and high-frequency traders.” That 60 Minutes program occurred during President Obama’s administration. Not only was nothing materially done to stop the rigging during Obama’s eight years in office, but the rigging has grown in both size and complexity since then as hedge funds and Dark Pools take over large segments of stock market structure. Dark Pools are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2024 ~ The Bank Policy Institute calls itself “a nonpartisan public policy, research and advocacy group…” In fact, it’s a registered lobbyist for the megabanks on Wall Street. The Chairman of its Board of Directors is Jamie Dimon, the Chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. The rest of its Board consists exclusively of the top executives of large banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. So when the Bank Policy Institute decides to sue the Fed, one of the key regulators of the Wall Street megabanks, you can be certain that Jamie Dimon has a dog in this fight. (Plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Fed, which was filed on Christmas Eve, include other bank-funded groups as well.) Dimon sits atop not just the largest bank in the U.S. but also the bank … Continue reading →