Search Results for: koch

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: November 5, 2024 ~ Yesterday, the National Association of Realtors released their annual Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. It showed that by the time Americans have saved enough money for a downpayment to buy their first home in America, they will be close to middle age. The study recorded the median age of first-time home buyers as the oldest in the history of the study, at 38 years of age. (In the 1980s, first-time home buyers were in their 20s.) At the same time the age of first-time home buyers was hitting a record high, the percentage of first-time buyers was hitting a record low – just 24 percent of the market in the latest survey. That is the lowest percentage share of first-time home buyers since the National Association of Realtors began conducting the survey in 1981. The study reminded us of a series of articles … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2024 ~ The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) typically receives high praise from Wall Street On Parade for leveling the playing field between the pillagers on Wall Street and the hardworking poor and middle class of America. But yesterday’s announcement of the CFPB’s settlement with Goldman Sachs and Apple over some of the most abusive conduct we have observed against consumers in decades left us with the impression that Goldman Sachs’ lawyers had browbeat the CFPB into a watered-down deal. The enforcement action by the CFPB pertained to years of abuses by both Apple and Goldman Sachs involving the Apple Credit Card. Under the CFPB’s settlement, Goldman Sachs will pay $19.8 million in redress to victims and a $45 million civil money penalty, bringing Goldman’s total settlement to $64.8 million. Apple will pay a $25 million civil money penalty for a combined $89.8 million … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 3, 2024 ~ As desperate and traumatized residents of Western North Carolina have learned over the past week, everything Americans thought they knew about storm threats must now be reexamined. Some Western North Carolina counties located 485 miles north of where Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26 in Florida’s Big Bend area have reported more deaths than the entire state of Florida. At yesterday’s press briefing in Buncombe County, North Carolina, Sheriff Quentin Miller reported that the death toll for his county from Hurricane Helene had reached 61; that’s four times the 14 Hurricane Helene-related deaths that the state of Florida is reporting. As of this morning, total deaths reported in all states impacted by Hurricane Helene is 190, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After wiping out communities on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 15, 2024 ~ Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, was sitting in the front row at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday and narrowly missed being in the line of fire according to an interview he gave to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning. McCormick told Tapper that Trump had called out from the podium, asking McCormick to join him on the stage and he “started to walk up onto the stage” when Trump said: “No, no, I will have you up in a little bit. And then the shooting started a minute or two later. And so, had he not changed his mind, I think I would have been up on that stage.” According to the PBS video of Trump’s opening remarks at the rally, which also capture the gunfire, Trump called McCormick a “great, great … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2024 ~ Last week, Wall Street On Parade published an article with this title: The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto. We began the article with this: “In the span of two business days, six of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have radically altered American democracy. On Friday, those six right-wing justices gutted the ability of federal government agencies to protect the waters Americans drink, the air they breathe, their ability to impose food and drug safety rules and worker protections. On Monday, the same six effectively crowned the President of the United States a king by immunizing the President from criminal prosecution for any conduct that can be construed as official acts.” This unprecedented action by six of the right-wing Supreme Court Justices appears to be laying the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2024 ~ When we heard that the scrappy, independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, was going to appear on “Face the Nation” yesterday, we figured he might have something to say about the New York Times’ unprecedented and relentless drumbeat to force President Joe Biden to step down as a Presidential candidate. We weren’t disappointed. Sanders said this: “I will tell you this, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat or Independent: the American people are disillusioned, they are angry, they think that government is busy paying attention to the rich and wealthy campaign donors. And by the way, I find it personally insulting that the New York Times and all these media organizations go out front page ‘This is what the billionaire campaign donors feel.’ Well, to hell with the billionaire campaign donors. Let’s worry about the working class of this country and what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 2, 2024 ~ In the span of two business days, six of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have radically altered American democracy. On Friday, those six right-wing justices gutted the ability of federal government agencies to protect the waters Americans drink, the air they breathe, their ability to impose food and drug safety rules and  worker protections. On Monday, the same six effectively crowned the President of the United States a king by immunizing the President from criminal prosecution for any conduct that can be construed as official acts. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a scathing dissent. (Scroll down to her dissent at this link.) To drive home the hubris of the majority’s decision, she read her dissent aloud in the courtroom, boldly enunciating her weightiest words. In her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, in a stunning 7-2 win for the little guys and gals in America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau et al v Community Financial Services Association of America, Ltd., et al. Making the decision all the more stunning, it was written by Clarence Thomas, the sitting justice who has been under withering attack in the press for selling out to special interests. (There is speculation that the Thomas name is on the decision to quiet the media uproar against him.) The two dissenting votes came from Justices Samuel Alito (target of a ProPublica investigation in 2023) and Neil Gorsuch, around whom conflicts of interest controversy is also swirling. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been the target of Wall Street lobbyists since before its birth under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2024 ~ Smart Americans have found two ways to outwit the wealth extraction machinery on Wall Street. They buy a home and build its value over time with sweat equity; and/or they start their own small business. A very large number of Americans who are living comfortably in retirement today built their wealth through one or both of these avenues. Wall Street banks, on the other hand, typically extract wealth from the little guy in a multitude of insidious ways – from high interest credit cards to excessive fees, tricked-up mortgages and outright frauds. Nothing better illustrated this wealth stripping than the 2013 PBS program from Frontline called The Retirement Gamble. The program documented the following: If you work for 50 years and receive the typical long-term return of 7 percent on the stock mutual funds in your 401(k) plan, and your fees are 2 … Continue reading →