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markwayne mullin
Trump Admin Readies Big Gift for Wall Street While Waging War, Gutting Aid Programs
“At a time of extreme and growing inequality," said one critic, "today’s proposals will drain lending away from Main Street families’ needs and priorities and further enrich the already wealthy on Wall Street."
Mar 19, 2026
The Trump administration and Federal Reserve unveiled proposals Thursday that would significantly reduce capital requirements for the largest banks in the United States, potentially setting the stage for another financial industry collapse as the US-Israeli war on Iran destabilizes the global economy and jacks up prices for consumers.
Under the new rules proposed by the Fed, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, large banks would have to hold nearly 5% less capital on average. The advocacy organization Better Markets noted that the proposals—combined with other deregulatory actions taken by the Trump administration and the Fed over the past year—would return Wall Street banks' capital requirements "to the irresponsibly low 2007 levels they had just before the 2008 crash."
“At a time of extreme and growing inequality, when tens of millions of Americans are struggling to pay their bills, today’s proposals will drain lending away from Main Street families’ needs and priorities and further enrich the already wealthy on Wall Street and the top 10% of Americans they focus on serving," Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, said in a statement. "The banking agencies’ proposals to loosen capital rules are a victory for Wall Street lobbying, and claims to the contrary are nothing more than an attempt to mislead the American people."
Fed Gov. Michael Barr, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, was the central bank board's lone dissenting voice against the new rules, a product of years of aggressive Wall Street lobbying for less stringent regulations in the wake of the Great Recession.
"Today's proposals, if adopted, would harm the resilience of banks and the US financial system," Barr warned in a statement. "There are suggestions that liquidity requirements could also be reduced. Additionally, Federal Reserve supervisory staff have been cut by over 30%, and supervisory practices have been weakened. Banking is built on trust. I worry greatly that these actions are rapidly eroding that trust."
The new deregulatory package, which will be subject to a 90-day public comment period before it's finalized, comes as President Donald Trump is waging an expensive and deadly war on Iran with no end in sight and attacking social programs at home, from Medicaid to nutrition assistance.
“With private credit markets cratering, AI transforming the workforce, and Trump’s Iran war threatening the world economy, we need healthy, resilient, well-capitalized banks," said Bartlett Naylor, an economist for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "Lessons learned after millions lost their jobs, homes, and savings following the 2008 megabank crash must not be ignored."
"Trump’s bank regulators propose to tear at the already tissue-thin layer of solvency levels at the nation’s banks," said Naylor. "Lowering solvency standards won’t generate more loans; it will only send banks closer to failure."
Matt Stoller, an anti-monopoly researcher and author of the BIG newsletter, wrote that the juxtaposition of a quagmire in Iran, Wall Street deregulation, and millions of Americans losing health insurance "tells the story" of the Trump administration.
Today's WSJ front page tells the story of the Trump admin.
#1: Hegseth Says ‘No Time Set’ on Ending Operations in Iran
#2: U.S. Regulators Propose More Lenient Capital Rules for Big Banks
#3: Millions of Americans Are Going Uninsured Following Expiration of ACA Subsidies pic.twitter.com/26jKsQuNc4
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 19, 2026
The effort to curb banks' capital requirements was spearheaded by Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee whose nomination last year was criticized by watchdogs as a "gift to the banking industry."
Kelleher of Better Markets said Thursday that "such counterproductive, shortsighted, and wrongheaded rulemaking isn’t a surprise given that the interests of Wall Street’s biggest banks are driving the priorities at the banking agencies, rather than facts, merit, and the public interest."
"The worst is at the Federal Reserve, where the senior regulatory staff comes from Wall Street’s top DC lobbyist (the Bank Policy Institute), Goldman Sachs, and one of Wall Street’s top law firms (a former partner is now the director responsible for supervising and regulating his recent Wall Street clients)," Kelleher observed. "That’s why mindless deregulation, especially for the biggest Wall Street banks, is at the top of the agenda, just as it was in the years before the 2008 crash."
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Heat Wave Scorches Western States, Just as Big Oil Predicted
Mar 19, 2026
The Western half of the United States is entering a historic heat wave that will subject millions of Americans to sweltering conditions and is forecast to break records across California, Arizona, and neighboring states. Already on Monday, 39 million people were under heat alerts, and the heat wave will continue expanding and intensifying as the week progresses, pushing temperatures 20–30 degrees above normal across the region.
This heat wave will have massive costs. Big Oil companies should be required to help pay for these costs, given that this is exactly the kind of climate disaster these corporations predicted their products would cause.
This heat wave will impose massive costs.
This heat event will likely inflict massive costs on the region’s public health, economy, and water availability.
Extreme heat is the most lethal weather-related killer, and a heat wave in March is particularly dangerous, since people are not yet accustomed to such high temperatures. As the National Weather Service warned, this event will be “very dangerous, particularly for those not acclimated to the heat and/or traveling from cooler climates.” The 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave directly caused well over 1,000 deaths. This event, which features a heat dome similar to the one that drove the 2021 disaster, will likely not have as high of a death toll, but mortality could still be considerable.
Extreme heat also has profound economic effects. Heat waves have cost the world trillions of dollars in recent decades, and $162 billion in losses in the U.S. in 2024, equivalent to nearly 1% of GDP. This month’s heat wave will undoubtedly drain billions of dollars from the affected families, businesses, cities, and states.
Also alarming is the effect this event will have on water availability and fire risk across the region in the coming months. After the warmest winter on record, the Western U.S. has already been experiencing one of the worst snow droughts in decades. This heat wave is forecast to melt the region’s already disastrously low snowpack at least a month ahead of schedule, resulting in a summer of serious drought and dangerous wildfire conditions during the upcoming dry season.
This heat wave is a climate disaster.
Though we’ll have to wait for a weather attribution study to confirm the exact causal connection between this heat wave and human-caused climate change, it is clear that global warming is a key driver of this disaster. As the National Weather Service stated, “Many locations are likely to set both all-time high temperatures for the month of March and their earliest 100-degree temperature on record.” This intensity is at least comparable to—and possibly more extreme than—prior heat waves that studies have shown were caused by climate change. For example, multiple extreme event attribution studies determined that the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. A metastudy of these kinds of analyses found that climate change made that event between 340 times more likely and infinitely more likely, and that “the probability of the 2021 heat wave’s intensity in a preindustrial climate was essentially zero.” Scientists have drawn similar conclusions about the heat wave that baked the Southwestern U.S. in July 2023. This month’s heat wave is similarly outside the parameters of historical precedent.
As Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, put it: “We know that in a warming world we see both more frequent and more extreme heat events. In particular, that’s the most slam-dunk type of event when it comes to thinking about extremes and climate change. And this is going to be exactly that type of event. It will be, in a climatological and statistical sense, record-shattering. I’m using that language intentionally because we’re not just breaking records—we’re breaking long-standing records by enormous margins. Essentially to a point where it would be almost impossible to have heat waves of this kind of magnitude if it weren’t for the warming that’s already occurred.”
Big Oil predicted heat waves like this one and chose to cause them anyway, while lying about climate science.
A relatively small number of major fossil fuel companies are responsible for the majority of all greenhouse gas emissions generated by humanity. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all global greenhouse gas emissions generated since 1854, and just 57 companies are responsible for 80% of the emissions generated since 2016. Climate attribution science can increasingly quantify the impact of specific companies’ emissions on specific heat waves. A recent climate attribution study published in the prestigious journal Nature found that for a number of extreme heat events, including the 2021 and 2023 heat waves cited above, the emissions of each of the biggest fossil fuel companies—including, for example, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips—made those heat events at least 10,000 times more likely to have occurred, in the median analysis.
These companies didn’t just contribute to this heat wave—they did so knowingly. For decades, Big Oil companies were internally forecasting exactly these kinds of climate disasters. In 1996, for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that colluded to spread climate denial during the 1990s, reviewing the science connecting climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” He discussed how the elderly, sick, and young would be particularly vulnerable. And he explained the idea of threshold temperatures, referring to the point at which temperatures cross a critical limit beyond which mortality rises significantly.
In addition to extreme, lethal heat waves, Big Oil companies projected numerous other dangerous harms from the use of their products. For example, in 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges.”
By the time of this Shell Report, the American Petroleum Institute had already spent years predicting that climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels would be “catastrophic” and have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival.” Meanwhile Exxon was forecasting that global warming would do “great irreversible harm to our planet” and cause “suffering and death.”
Even knowing that their products would cause catastrophic climate disasters—including lethal heat waves like this month’s—Big Oil companies developed and orchestrated a multi-decade, coordinated campaign to defraud the public about the dangers of climate change, and blocked solutions that could have prevented these disasters.
There are numerous internal strategy memos and external materials outlining Big Oil’s massive disinformation campaigns. These were designed, in the words of one fossil fuel coalition’s mission statement, to “[r]eposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
Documented tactics that Big Oil companies used to deceive regulators, investors, and consumers about climate change include:
- Publishing deceptive advertisements with false claims about climate;
- Directing bought-and-paid-for scientists to fraudulently undermine the clear scientific consensus on climate;
- Harassing and attempting to discredit scientists and activists engaged in researching and communicating the actual climate science;
- Deceptively attacking renewable energy efforts and policies;
- Greenwashing to falsely promote Big Oil products and brands as climate solutions.
There is also substantial evidence this conspiracy has delayed climate mitigation and adaptation measures that could have prevented climate disasters like this heat wave. In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who co-sponsored the resolution that prohibited the U.S. from ratifying the international climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol:
“I was misled. Others were misled. When [fossil fuel companies] had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly — I mean, they lied.… It would have changed everything [had they told the truth]. I think it would have changed the average citizen’s appreciation of climate change.… And mine, of course. It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.”
Big Oil companies have, indeed, cost this country and the world. Extreme heat waves like the one impacting the Western U.S. this month are one of the catastrophic disasters these companies predicted their conduct would bring about. They should be made to pay.
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Watchdog Blasts Mullin’s Self-Enrichment as Fetterman Joins GOP to Advance Trump DHS Pick
"Mullin’s long list of conflicts of interest even as he seeks this next level of public office is reprehensible."
Mar 19, 2026
Government watchdog Public Citizen on Thursday slammed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for voting to advance the nomination of Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin to be the next US homeland security secretary.
Shortly after the committee delivered an 8-to-7 vote to advance Mullin's (R-Okla.) nomination out of committee, Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert described the move as "simply inappropriate."
"It is inappropriate because of his self-enrichment," Gilbert said. "Mullin’s long list of conflicts of interest even as he seeks this next level of public office is reprehensible."
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Mullin has grown significantly wealthier throughout his tenure first as a US congressman then as a US senator, in part because he is "one of the most prolific stock buyers in Congress."
According to financial disclosure forms cited by the Times, Mullin's net worth in 2024 was between $29 million and $97 million, a massive jump from the estimated net worth of $2.8 million to $9 million he reported in 2012.
In addition to citing Mullin's self-enrichment during his political career, Gilbert decried the senator's past statements defending actions taken by federal immigration enforcement officials, including the fatal shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
"It is inappropriate because Mullin has consistently defended ICE agents involved in fatal shootings," said Gilbert, "and justified the use of lethal force in enforcement operations, rather than calling for accountability or reform of use-of-force policies. It is inappropriate because he treats protest against ICE operations as a prosecutable offense rather than a legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights and an expression of community concern."
While Mullin on Wednesday walked back his past attack on Pretty as "deranged," he stood by his claim that the shooting of Good was entirely justified.
Mullin's nomination advanced to the Senate floor after Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) broke with his party, canceling out the "no" vote on the committee delivered by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who got into an angry spat with Mullin on Wednesday over past comments the Oklahoma Republican made justifying a 2017 assault on his colleague from Kentucky.
In a social media post defending his vote to advance Mullin, Fetterman argued that "we need a leader" at the US Department of Homeland Security and said his vote in favor of the nomination was "rooted in a strong committed, constructive working relationship with Senator Mullin for our nation’s security."
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Trump is Illegally Undermining Oversight of His Social Security Sabotage
Mar 19, 2026
The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, in response to new revelations from the Washington Post that a Social Security inspector general’s report on phone wait times was modified after the agency reviewed it:
“Inspectors general have a crucial role, conducting independent oversight of agencies on behalf of the American people. The Trump administration is undermining that oversight at every turn.
Shortly after taking office, Trump fired the inspectors general at 19 agencies, including the Social Security Administration. This has clearly had a chilling effect. In response to a request from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that the IG’s office audit SSA’s handling of its 1-800 number, the IG issued a report days before Christmas, when it received little attention. It also buried the most important finding:
“[A]bout 25 million calls ended without the callers receiving service either because the callers disconnected the calls, the callers did not answer SSA’s callback, SSA could not call back the callers, or all telephone lines were busy. SSA’s wait time metrics do not include the wait times associated with these calls.”
Now, it is revealed that the Social Security IG modified a report to remove the fact that Americans were waiting up to two hours to speak to a representative on Social Security’s 1-800 number. This modification happened after the agency reviewed the report — a clear violation of the IG’s independence.
It is already clear that the Supreme Court and Congressional Republicans are enabling the Trump administration’s Social Security sabotage at every turn. The Supreme Court restored DOGE’s access to private Social Security data, after a lower court had blocked it. Congressional Republicans are thwarting every Democratic effort to investigate data leaks and deteriorating service at Social Security.
Now, thanks to today’s revelations, we know it is even worse. The IG has no ability to conduct independent oversight. There is no meaningful check on the Trump administration’s Social Security sabotage. That will not change until the November elections. If Democrats take control of at least one chamber of Congress, they will gain subpoena power — and the ability to start holding those who are undermining Social Security accountable.”
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