Podcast
Racket News
Hosted by Matt Taibbi · EN
“We care if it’s true. We don’t care why.”
22episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Activism, Uncensored: Veterans Push Back
Mar 20, 2025Tap to summarizeThe Trump administration is planning to cut 83,000 jobs from the Veterans Administration under a reorganization plan being developed. That would bring staffing at the VA down to 2019 levels.Many veterans are worried about how these cuts would affect their benefits. Job cuts in the Veterans Health Administration would not be avoided since it has about 90 percent of the VA’s 482,000 employees. In addition, federal government cuts that have already occurred have hit veterans especially hard.Veterans pushed back with a series of protests March 14-16 in Washington, D.C. But the protests were not limited to VA cutbacks, as you’ll see in this Activism, Uncensored segment by News2Share’s Ford Fischer and Paul Mulholland.- Greg CollardRacket News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Transcribe →Listen to This Article - Joe Biden and the Autopen
Mar 20, 2025Tap to summarizeA fight about Joe Biden's pardons may escalate into a larger question about the last presidencyText published 03/17/25:Narrated by Jared MooreArt by Daniel MedinaListen to subscriber only audio in your podcast appShare the free versions of Racket To Go on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts
Transcribe →Subsidized Europe Cries in Despair
Mar 19, 2025Tap to summarizeFrom the Financial Times, “The Costly End of the EU’s ‘Peace Dividend’”:Europe enjoyed its years of low military spending thanks to a prolonged period of protection from the US, allowing it to build one of the most generous social security systems in the world… Across the EU, social protection has grown as a share of total government spending, rising from 36.6 per cent in 1995 to 41.4 per cent on the eve of the pandemic… While higher borrowing can cover some initial outlays… the cost of rearmament will ultimately be shouldered by taxpayers and beneficiaries of the continent’s social security nets. There you have it. While in America it took an electoral upheaval and a near-military assault on the federal budget before citizens learned they were spending oversight-free billions on “climate change things” or funding trans hair salons in India, Europeans are still in the stage of needing The Financial Times to explain that in an unsubsidized country, taxpayers pay for taxpayer benefits. Since EU President Ursula von der Leyen announced weeks ago that Europe is commencing a new “era of rearmament,” the atlanticist press has been churning copy in a frantic effort to explain what living without subsidized defense means. As an American who’s sent decades of taxes overseas, these dispatches are hard reading. It looks like a bunch of pundits Googled, “How do major industrialized countries pay for their own defense?” The tone is what an editor breaking the news about Santa Claus to forty-year-olds would shoot for. It’s incredible stuff:Subscribe now Read more
Transcribe →Timeline: The Alien Enemies Act
Mar 19, 2025Tap to summarizeUntil last week, “war” was the common denominator in describing the three events for which presidents invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.The War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. You get the idea. No one disputed those were wars. Racket News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.That’s not the case with President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act — officially called “An Act Respecting Alien Enemies” when it passed 227 years ago. 1798alienact27.3KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadThe Trump Administration has to make the case that its war on the Tren de Aragua gang is a real war rather than a campaign like, say, the war on drugs in the 1980s. The last time the Alien Enemies Act was put into use was after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt issued a proclamation on Dec. 7, 1941, aimed at non-citizen immigrants from Japan. Similar proclamations were issued the following day that targeted German and Italian immigrants. FDR then went a huge step further three months later with a superseding executive order to put these groups in internment camps, with people of Japanese ancestry primarily affected.Here’s a timeline of events, disputes, and records related to the fourth invocation of the Alien Enemies Act eight decades later:Friday, March 14Trump signs the proclamation, targeting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The proclamation says the gang is a terrorist organization whose members have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”Saturday, March 15A lot happens on this day. First, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward quickly sue on behalf of five Venezuelans — one in New York and four in Texas. The proclamation has not been made public, but the two groups say in their petition they believe it will be signed imminently. They argue that the Alien Enemies Act “has only ever been a power invoked in time of war, and plainly only applies to warlike actions: it cannot be used here against nationals of a country —Venezuela— with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States, and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States.”ACLU Complaint306KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadLater that morning, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg issues a temporary restraining order to prohibit the federal government from deporting the five Venezuelans. <path d="M21 12a9 9 0 ...
Transcribe →Racket on Wall Street: Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?
Mar 19, 2025Tap to summarizeTHE SCHEME: Operational Buffoonery THE COMPANY: Citigroup Inc.THE NEWS: Citigroup credited an account $81 trillion, or approximately 75% of the world’s GDP, to a client account instead of $280 last AprilIn 1963 Jimmy Breslin wrote a book “Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?”, chronicling the 1962 inaugural season of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets. The Mets set new standards for ineptitude, going 40 wins and 120 losses, seemingly figuring out new ways to lose ballgames every week. According to Breslin’s book, Mets manager Casey Stengel, exasperated by another soul-crushing defeat cried out, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”Interestingly, the New York Mets now call their home Citi Field, named of course after Citigroup. On February 27, The Financial Times reported that in April 2024: Read more
Transcribe →The Angst of the Well-Endowed
Mar 19, 2025Tap to summarizeThe size of this one? $53 billionFrom Thomas Edsall in the New York Times this morning:Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned… The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition? At Johns Hopkins, the loss of $800 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants has forced the school to lay off 2,200 foreign and domestic workers… The Trump administration announced that it was cutting $400 million in grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, I’d have found these stories about Elon Von Hitler-Musk detonating thousands of campus-related jobs horrifying. But the education sob stories now flying off the presses are a Burj Khalifa of “needs context.” A gigantic lie of omission is a constant feature of these stories:Subscribe now Read more
Transcribe →Do Your Own Research: How to File Your Own Freedom of Information Requests
Mar 18, 2025Tap to summarizePublic records are a key part of Racket’s library project—not just for the stories we cover, but as a resource to help you access the records that matter to you. I figured talking to a guy with “FOIA” as his vanity license plate would be a good place to start.Allan Blutstein helps run a site called FOIA Advisor. It’s a labor of love among Blutstein and two others that he jokes is funded by his credit card. All three are involved in conservative politics for their day jobs, but FOIA Advisor is for anyone. It has a roundup of FOIA news, FOIA-related court cases, links to searchable FOIA regulations for federal agencies, samples of FOIA appeal letters by conservative and liberal groups, FOIA letter-generator sites, and electronic reading rooms where you can access records and see what other people are requesting.FOIA Advisor’s face pageThe reading rooms are helpful. For one, their FOIA logs remove the need to FOIA all FOIA requests as I did back in the day. Blutstein also says they can be tremendously helpful in crafting your own request. Blutstein should know. He worked at the Justice Department responding to FOIA requests. He was also principal legal counsel for FOIA staff at the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Financial Stability. Now, he’s director of FOIA operations for the America Rising Corporation. Our conversation with him, edited for clarity and brevity:Racket (Greg Collard): Which features of FOIA Advisor are most popular?Allan Blutstein: Our summaries and postings of court opinions. There are hundreds of federal court FOIA cases issued every year and we try to keep on top of that. My former office of the Justice Department also summarizes cases, but they’re usually a month or two behind and they don’t post the actual decision. They will give long summaries. I’m not sure if that’s for trademark intellectual property purposes or wh...
Transcribe →Exclusive: Andrew Weissmann in Crosshairs as War on Big Law Continues
Mar 17, 2025Tap to summarizeAndrew Weissmann, left, was a deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and criticized his old boss for going soft on Donald TrumpFor years, Andrew Weissmann was one of the most visible and vociferous critics of Donald Trump, as a former deputy to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and MSNBC legal analyst who wrote a book wondering if the president “paid bribes to foreign officials,” or had “Russian business deals in the works” when he ran for president. Now Weissmann is facing hard questions of his own, about eerily similar themes. In a pair of letters obtained by Racket, District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Ed Martin demanded to know why Weissmann ignored an alleged “conflict of interest” in signing off on a $4.5 billion settlement involving the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht in 2016, the largest such case in history. Weissmann had been (and is now) a partner at Jenner & Block, which represented a reputed key player in the story, a Canadian private equity firm called Brookfield Asset Management that until January was chaired by that country’s new Prime Minister, Mark Carney. From Martin’s letter to Weissmann:Under your leadership, the Fraud Section participated in investigations concerning Brookfield — your office called one case, the federal investigation of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, “the largest bribery case in history.” Somehow, Brookfield and its proven corrupt subsidiary, Rutas de Lima, were excluded from sanctions. After you ordered investigations into Brookfield closed, you then returned to Jenner & Block in 2020 as co-chairman of its investigations, compliance, and defense practice.The letters sent Tuesday, March 11th to Weissmann and Jenner & Block co-managing partner Ishan Bhabha (PDFs at bottom of page):<div class="pencraft pc-reset icon-contain...
Transcribe →ATW Livestream Tonight at 8 PM ET/7 PM CT
Mar 17, 2025Tap to summarizeTonight, Matt and Walter will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by discussing the latest developments surrounding the Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks. They will also take a closer look at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate student and green card holder who was recently detained by the Trump administration. In case you missed it, here’s an excerpt from the piece Matt wrote about the Khalil situation last week:Forget Khalil. He’s not the issue. The problem is Trump officials pledging to throw masses of people out of the country for offenses not yet committed and on vague pretexts like being “aligned with Hamas.” As [Tyler] Coward put it (see accompanying interview), “What does that mean?” Similarly, what does it mean to be a “Hamas sympathizer,” and what constitutes “aiding and abetting violations [of] immigration laws,” a standard Trump just decided to employ to deny relief to some federal student loan holders?Matt’s interview with Tyler Coward, the lead government counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is also worth a read.Please tune in at 8:00 PM ET on the Substack app, Rumble, YouTube:Or follow @mtaibbi or @walterkirn on Twitter. See you soon!
Transcribe →Joe Biden and the Autopen
Mar 17, 2025Tap to summarizeOn Saturday, January 18th, two days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Racket published “Goodbye to Joe Biden, and Whoever Was President the Last Four Years.” From the piece:Subscribe now Read more
Transcribe →