Greg Palast on Stealing Venezuela

Nicolas Maduro Did Not Steal the Venezuelan Election

Greg Palast’s Column

By Greg Palast

The author with Nicolas Maduro before he became the President of Venezuela.

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, “confidential”.

The guy in the cheap brown windbreaker walking up the dirty tenement steps to my New York office looked like a bus driver.

Nicolas Maduro, elected President of Venezuela last Sunday, did indeed drive a bus, then led the drivers’ union, then drove Chávez’s laws through the National Assembly as Venezuela’s National Assembly chief.

And this week, the US State Department is refusing to accept the result, suggesting Maduro hijacked the vote count. But did he?

Maduro came to me that day in 2004 on a quiet mission, sent by President Hugo Chávez to give me information I needed for my investigation for Rolling Stone – and to get information from me that might save Chávez’s life.

The central topic was the “Invisible Ring”. Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: “That which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence… which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring.”

(“Invisible Ring”? Someone at the State Department has read too many Alan Furst novels.)

On the grainy film, they worried that “Mr Corey” (a code name we easily cracked) would blow his cover and begin barking, “I am from the CIA! I am from the CIA!”

Maduro at Greg Palast’s office.

“Mr Corey” was certainly not from the CIA, an agency holding on to one last fig-leaf of discretion. This crew was far more dangerous, from a spy-for-hire corporation, Wackenhut Inc. I’d been tracking Wackenhut for years, ever since their spies – more Austin Powers than James Bond – were arrested while on a black-bag job for British Petroleum. They’d attempted to illegally tape a US Congressman by running a toy truck with a microphone through the ceiling vents over the lawmaker’s head.

But even clowns, when heavily armed, can be deadly. In 2002, Chávez was kidnapped with the blessing of the US Ambassador right out of the presidential palace and flown by helicopter over the Caribbean where, Chávez later told me, the President assumed he’d be invited for a swim from 2,000 feet. Instead, just 48 hours later, Chávez was back at his desk.

But Washington wouldn’t quit the coup business. New documents revealed several interlocked methods (“rings”) for overthrowing Venezuela’s elected government.

First, US operatives would monkey with voter registrations – and if that didn’t steal the election from Chávez’s party, the next step was to provoke riots against Chávez’s elections “theft”. The riots would lead to deaths – the deaths would be the excuse for the US to back another coup d’etat to “restore order” and “democracy” in Venezuela – and restore Venezuela’s oil to Exxon. (Chávez had seized majority control of the oil fields and Exxon was furious.)

Maduro had already figured the US operatives wanted to use, “The collection of [voters’] signatures… to [occur] amidst a climate of violence and uncertainty, national and international uncertainty…To cause deaths the day of the collection of signatures.”

Hugo Chávez in 2003, the year after his kidnapping. (Image via.)

Would this be to justify another coup?

“Yes: The justification to tell the world Chávez is a murderer, Chávez is a dictator, Chávez is a terrorist and the OAS [Organisation of American States] should intervene and Chávez should be ousted.”

This week, the warlords of the rings are back in Caracas as, per the original script, the US State Department is backing opposition claims (no details provided) that Maduro’s win is in question. And per the old playbook, the losers are taking to the streets, seven voters are dead (mostly Chávistas, but not all) and Caracas waits for the coup’s next boot to drop.

Is a manoeuvre to remove Maduro far-fetched? George W Bush promoted the botched kidnapping of 2002. But it was the progressive Barack Obama who, newly elected President, blessed the overthrow of the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

Still, it’s fair to ask if Maduro and the Chávistas stole last week’s presidential election?

Answer: They didn’t have to. Even the Wall Street Journal accepts that, “for a majority of Venezuelans, Mr Chávez was a messiah,” and Maduro, the successor Chávez chose from his deathbed, had too big a lead to lose.

Still, the election was nearly stolen – by the US-backed anti-Chávistas.

How? That’s what Chávez wanted Maduro to find out from me: how could US operatives jerk with Venezuela’s voter rolls? It wasn’t a mere policy question: they knew Chávez wouldn’t be allowed to survive through another coup.

My answer: They could steal the vote the same way Bush did it in Florida – in fact, using the very same contractor. Take a look at these documents… from the pile I reviewed with Maduro:

The FBI memo detailing the shoplifting of Venezuela’s voter rolls. (Click to enlarge.)

According to this once-secret FBI memo, ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract – had shoplifted Venezuela’s voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

I did ask myself how our national security apparatchiks could say that filching these voter rolls made our nation more secure? What were they for?

I had little doubt. In November 2000, working for the Observer and BBC Newsnight, I discovered that a subsidiary of ChoicePoint had, for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, obtained his state’s voter rolls and “purged” more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, illegally denying them their vote. And that was how Jeb’s brother, George W, won the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

And now ChoicePoint had the data to allow Homeland Security to do a Florida on Venezuela – and Honduras and the others. (In 2006, the candidate of the left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won the election but lost the presidency through gross ballot-box finagling.)

Chávez himself read my findings on potential elections theft – to his nation on his TV show – and then he moved swiftly, establishing an election system that Jimmy Carter, who has headed vote observer teams in 92 nations, called, “an election process that is the best in the world”.

Here’s how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It’s as close to a bulletproof count as you can get.

Still, the loser bitched and – his bluff called – was allowed to pick all the precincts he wanted – 12,000 – to add to the audit.

And that’s why the US State Department then has to turn to the threat of bullets and “Third Ring” mayhem in the streets – to undermine the legitimacy of the new Maduro government and signal the US willingness to support a new coup.

Nicolas Maduro in 2010. (Image via.)

It won’t succeed this time, either. The populist socialist governments that the US couldn’t remove have now replaced the juntas and stooges that once gave the US control of the Organisation of American States. And Venezuelans themselves won’t let it happen.

What impressed me about Maduro and his boss Chávez was their reaction to the Third Ring and the attempted Florida-tion of their election. Instead of ordering mass arrests, their response was to strengthen democracy with a no-tricks voting system.

I should note that ChoicePoint, once exposed, apologised to Mexico’s government, agreed to destroy its ill-gotten voter rolls and, soon thereafter, sold itself to a credit-rating company. Wackenhut fired its goof-ball spooks and sold itself off in pieces. Both deny knowingly breaking laws of any nation. And in Bush’s US State Department, all hell broke loose, as UN Ambassador John Negroponte, sources verified, fumed over what he deemed a renegade neo-con escapade endangering remaining US oil interests. (In fact, Chevron ended up paying what I call a “coup tax”.)

The vote was still close, mainly because Maduro – a sincere, competent administrator – is no singing-dancing-camera-perfect Sinatra of politics like Chávez was.

Secretary of State Kerry’s challenge to Maduro’s 270,000-vote victory margin struck me as particularly poignant. Because in 2004, besides Chávez, I gave another presidential candidate evidence of the Bush gang’s ballot banditry: Senator John Kerry. Kerry lost to Bush by a slim 119,000 in Ohio, blatantly stolen, but Kerry refused to call for a recount. It took him two years to publicly acknowledge our findings – when he introduced, with Senator Ted Kennedy, legislation to fix America’s corrupted voting system, then let the proposed law die of neglect.

Chávez knew, and Kerry will never learn, that democracy requires more than a complete count – it requires complete courage.

For one more week, readers of VICE can download Palast’s short documentary, The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, originally filmed in Venezuela for BBC, without charge.  

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

Naked Capitalism: Clueless Bank Regulators

Banks Resorting to Old Tricks to Reduce Capital Levels

Wow, did I miss it? Didn’t we have a crisis just a bit over four years ago? And wasn’t one of the big drivers the fact that banks were overlevered and took on too much risk?

Well, not only do we seem to be rerunning that playbook, banks are using strategies right under regulators’s eyes last time around to create phony capital. Worse, are pulling the exact same tricks they did last time around. On top of that, regulators seem to be doing nothing to stop it.

As the New York Times reports (hat tip Scott):

Banks have been shedding risky assets to show regulators that they are not as vulnerable as they were during the financial crisis. In some cases, however, the assets don’t actually move — the bank just shifts the risk to another institution.

This trading sleight of hand has been around Wall Street for a while. But as regulators press for banks to be safer, demand for these maneuvers — known as capital relief trades or regulatory capital trades — has been growing, especially in Europe.

Yes, sports fans. Eurobanks, who are so large relative to GDP that their governments can’t credibly backstop the banking system (and that list includes pretty much every county in Europe, including Germany) are getting equity booster shots from hedge funds and pension funds:

Rather than selling the assets, potentially at a loss, the banks transfer a slice of the risk associated with the assets, usually loans. The buyers are typically hedge funds, whose investors are often pensions that manage the life savings of schoolteachers and city workers. The buyers agree to cover a percentage of losses on these assets for a fee, sometimes 15 percent a year or more.

The loans then look less worrisome — at least to the bank and its regulator. As a result, the bank does not need to hold as much capital, potentially improving profitability.

This is ridiculous. How many hedge funds were forced to shut down in the crisis? Answer: a not trivial number, including ones managed by Goldman, the supposed ne plus ultra of that business. And are these regulators kicking the tires of hedge funds to see how good this equity really is? No way would hedgies stand for that kind of scrutiny. And in any event, it would be pretty meaningless, given the speed with which a hedge fund can change its risk exposures.

This is another version of the fantasy we had last time around, that risks could be sliced, diced, price, and distributed efficiently. But moving risk around does not eliminate it. And why should investors other than bank equity and bond holders bear risk? If you are going to start disaggregating a bank balance sheet, why have a bank at all? All you do is create more tight coupling across the financial system. As we’ve been warning for years (following Richard Bookstaber) the first job in reducing systemic risk is reducing tight coupling, aka interconnectedness. Any other risk reduction action is likely to make matter worse if you don’t do that first. Even Timothy Geithner in 2007 understood that well. From a March speech:

A third issue relates to the dynamics of failure and the infrastructure that supports these markets. The dramatic growth in the volume of over-the-counter derivatives and the growth in the number and size of leveraged funds inevitably complicate the resolution of the failure of a large financial institution that is active in these markets. The sheer number of financial contracts that would have to be unraveled in the context of a default, the challenge that a former colleague of mine likes to refer to as “unscrambling the eggs,” could exacerbate and prolong uncertainty, and complicate the process of resolution.

And the more you look, the worse these capital relief trades look. They are an exact rerun of the scheme that was popular with Eurobanks in the runup to the crisis:

Most of these trades are structured as credit-default swaps, a derivative that resembles insurance. These kinds of swaps pushed the insurance giant American International Group to the brink of collapse in September 2008. Another red flag is that banks often use special-purpose vehicles located abroad, frequently in the Cayman Islands, to structure these trades.

This account isn’t quite right, but the truth is even more alarming. The credit default swaps that felled AIG were the ones related to subprime, where it had entered into contracts that required it to post collateral (this was more like a classic CDS, while similar agreements by monolines did not have this feature). AIG had to post more and more collateral both because the value of the CDOs it had insured were falling, and it was being downgraded, which led to an automatic requirement to post more collateral. But AIG had ALSO written over $300 billion in regulatory relief capital to Eurobanks. If AIG had failed, the banks would have been exposed as having less capital than they claimed, and that could conceivably have kicked off runs at the weaker ones.

And the investors aren’t necessarily absorbing the risk anyhow:

Some regulators say they are concerned that in some instances these transactions are not actually taking risk off bank balance sheets. For instance, a financial institution may end up lending money to clients so they can invest in one of these trades, a move that could leave a bank with even more risk on its books.

The article proceeds to discuss specific trades done by UBS, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse. It mentions a fund created by Orchard Capital Group with New Mexico pension funds among its investors. I don’t know these pension funds in particular, but some New Mexico funds invested in particularly drecky CDOs the last time around. Given the historical level of corruption in New Mexico’s government investing (considerable), the participation of a New Mexico fund is not an encouraging sign.

And on top of that, the Times tells us that even if Dodd Frank limits some of these trades, they could be restructured to get around it.

One small bit of good news is that FDIC Vice Chairman’ Tom Hoenig’s speech criticizing Basel III pumps for the use of simple leverage ratio and much, much higher capital levels (hat tip Deus ex Machhiato):

In 2007, for example, the 10 largest and most complex U.S. banking firms reported Tier 1 capital ratios that, on average, exceeded 7 percent of risk-weighted assets. Regulators deemed these largest to be well capitalized. This risk-weighted capital measure, however, mapped into an average leverage ratio of just 2.8 percent. We learned all too late that having less than 3 cents of tangible capital for every dollar of assets on the balance sheet is not enough to absorb even the smallest of financial losses, and certainly not a major shock. With the crisis, the illusion of adequate capital was discovered, after having misled shareholders, regulators, and taxpayers….The Basel III proposal belatedly introduces the concept of a leverage ratio but calls for it to be only 3 percent, an amount already shown to be insufficient to absorb sizable financial losses in a crisis…

A leverage ratio as I’ve defined it explicitly excludes intangible items that cannot absorb losses in a crisis. Also, using IFRS accounting rules, off-balance sheet derivatives are brought onto the balance sheet, providing further insight into a firm’s leverage. Thus, the tangible leverage ratio is simpler to compute and more easily understood by bank managers, directors, and the public. Importantly also, it is more likely to be consistently enforced by bank supervisors.

Hoenig points out that bank equity ratios before the creation of the Fed were 13% to 16%, and he clearly thinks bank capital levels need to move a good way towards that level.

Would these capital relief trades be deemed to get the asset exposures off the balance sheet? Hoenig’s cold-water Yankee posture suggests not. Unfortunately, he’s not driving this train, but if the rest of the FDIC is on the same page as him, they may be able to restrict the use of capital relief trades in the US. Or at least one can hope so.

An Excerpt from Greg Palast’s Billionaires & Ballot Bandits

The Ice Man, Radioactive

When the Ice Man told Karl Rove, “I’m in,” he wasn’t fooling around. The Ice Man, Texan Harold Simmons, is now the Number One donor to the Republican Party. The Ice Man, who got his nickname for his merciless, cold-hearted tactics as a corporate raider, says he expects to give $36 million to Republican candidates and nominees in 2012. Add in what he’s giving Rove and it goes to well over $50 million for the year. Of course, that’s peanuts for a man worth nearly $10 billion.

In the 2012 Republican primary, he gave $1.2 million to presidential candidate Rick Santorum to attack Mitt Romney. And he gave nearly a million dollars to Restore Our  Future,  the  pro-Romney  super-PAC,  to  buy  ads to attack Newt Gingrich. He gave $1.1 million to Newt Gingrich to attack Santorum and Romney. He gave their opponent Rick Perry’s super-PAC yet another million to let the governor of Texas make a jackass of himself on national TV.

What is the Ice Man up to, giving each one of these guys enough money to beat the hell out of the other? I can’t claim to know everything in the Ice Man’s head. He’s playing multidimensional chess when I’m playing checkers. But, at the least, I know he’s teaching all the candidates to heel, roll over, and beg.

He certainly didn’t give a rat’s ass about the candidates’ positions on the hot-button issue of the primary, abortion and contraceptives. Simmons thinks all of them are nuts: he’s pro-choice. It’s not about philosophy, but, as Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, “It’s strictly business.”

Simmons is the King of Filth. I don’t mean porn; I mean the stuff that can kill you, and does. His two big businesses today  are  NL  Industries  and  Waste  Control  Specialists LLC. Their value, billions or busted, is completely depen- dent on government gimmes and rules: permits, environmental regulations, and the handling of poisons and taxes, of course—but most important, as we’ll see, the law of torts.

His $50 million for Rove and Republicans is only one half of 1 percent of his wealth. As his candidates’ tax and business proposals would easily boost his net worth by $2 billion, his return on investment could top 4,000 percent on just those two pieces of real estate called the White House and the Capitol. Not bad.

One investment, the $1.2 million Simmons put into Governor Rick Perry’s campaign for president, is already paying off big time.

The key for Simmons was that Perry’s run for president belly-flopped. The Ice Man is no fool: Simmons knew his fellow Texan was a putz and would crash and burn in the first presidential debates. So why blow $1.2 million on Perry?

Here’s why: Texas law is, believe it or not, one of the toughest regarding donations to a sitting governor’s campaign for reelection. But if that governor happens to be running for president, well, the sky’s the limit. And if that governor ends up back in the statehouse in Texas, that governor knows who’s pleasured his campaign treasury.

Perry’s loony run for the White House, once finished, meant that Perry remains governor of Texas, exactly where the Ice Man needs him.

Why? The Ice Man’s new big investment is Waste Control Specialists LLC. The Ice Man wants to take in all of America’s toxins and poisons, creating a twenty-square-mile toxic dump in West Texas. But it was a dump without a hole. The business zoomed in value once the State of Texas gave Simmons a hole for his waste dump. The permit for the crapola was issued despite the unanimous objection by the state’s own expert panel, which said the hole was way too close to the giant Ogallala aquifer, the very same water source that Obama tried to save by moving the XL Pipeline. It’s the drinking water source for eight states.

Nevertheless, all three political hacks on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality appointed by Perry overruled their experts and issued the Ice Man the license for his dump—not even allowing a public hearing.

In March 2012, after flunked-out presidential candidate Perry skulked back to the Texas governor’s mansion, another one of his agencies approved Ice Man’s super-dump to take in nuclear waste, a decision made over the howling objections of Texas cities through which the hot junk would travel.

Now, toxic dumps have a habit of leaking and causing cancers. If this one leaks it will poison and irradiate the Ogallala.

And that leads to lawsuits. No problemo, pardner! Perry supported a voter referendum and lobbying campaign, backed by two million dollars from a group called Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which virtually eliminates the ability of Texans to sue for pain and suffering if they are dying of cancer from negligently leaked toxins. The two million for “Texans” came from the Ice Man.

For Ice Man Simmons, this is a two-fer—because Simmons’s main source of billions is in the mental retardation business. That requires some explanation.

Simmons controls NL Industries, a name that beats the hell out of “National Lead,” its old name, whose most well-known product was the popular Dutch Boy paint. The paint’s brilliant colors were attributed to its special ingredient: lead.

The Ice Man took over the company in 1986 (Simmons virtually invented the hostile leveraged buyout). His stock quickly doubled, earning him roughly a half-billion-dollar capital gain. But more important, he was able to seize the company’s treasury as a cash source for other raids. But there was a threat to the Ice Man’s cash kitty in NL. The Dutch Boy was, it turns out, a mass murderer. According to the industry’s own research, lead poisoning killed hundreds. Then it gets ugly: lead-based paint causes severe mental retardation in poor neighborhoods where the poison is peeling off the walls.

Example: In New York, Ana Amparo’s son suffered “brain injuries, cognitive deficits, learning disabilities, reduction of intelligence, behavioral and attention dis- orders.” When he was sixteen, forensic tests traced the problem back to lead paint whose chemical tags named the maker of the killer product: NL’s Dutch Boy.

The key for Simmons to keep his billions out of the hands of NL’s victims is “tort reform”—the political campaign to take away an injured person’s right to sue.

Simmons appears to have bought himself protection from lawsuits by the victims of his enterprises in Texas, and he’s made clear he wants to take his push for protection from his victims on the road to all fifty states.

When the lead-head isn’t fighting retarded children, Simmons is fighting taxpayers. Simmons’s company has refused to pay its share of the half billion dollars a year it costs to remove lead-contaminated paint from school-houses.

The regulations that removed lead from gasoline, paint, and most batteries have saved hundreds of lives and prevented thousands of cases of mental retardation. This makes Simmons crazy: he wants to eliminate all government environmental regulation—a philosophy you could call “Lucrative Libertarianism.”

All candidates who receive Ice Man’s easy-squeezy are pledging to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, but that’s not good enough. In 2012, Rove’s dogsbody, Congressman Tim Griffin, still not in prison, sponsored HR 4078, the Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act, “to provide that no agency may take any significant regulatory action until the unemployment rate is equal to or less than 6.0 percent.”

New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, sniffing the value of the bill to radioactivity king Simmons, formally moved to amend the proposed law’s title to the Nuclear Death and Destruction Act of 2012.

But what’s the use of a bill without a Congress to pass it, or a president to sign it?

As Simmons’s ally, corporate super-lobbyist Grover Norquist, put it, they just need a president “with enough working digits to handle a pen . . . to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

Prepared by Grover and the Ice Man.

And that’s what the $50 million in “donations” is for.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Numbers and charts can be manipulated to show just about anything you want…

The pie chart below is the government view of the budget. This is a distortion of how our income tax dollars are spent because it includes Trust Funds (e.g., Social Security), and the expenses of past military spending are not distinguished from nonmilitary spending.

The figures below are from an analysis of detailed tables in the “Analytical Perspectives” book of the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2009. The figures are federal funds, which do not include trust funds — such as Social Security — that are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or don’t pay) by April 15, 2008, goes to the federal funds portion of the budget.

Barbara Phillippi

Barbara Phillippi posted the following on our Facebook page, and it was subsequently picked up by the Being Liberal page, where it caused no small amount of commotion. For posterity, we’re posting it here as well…

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn’t get mad when they didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the 1%, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.

You didn’t get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn’t get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn’t get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values in the Wall Street crash.

You finally got mad when a black man was elected President, and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick… Oh, Hell No!

You’re not going to take ME back, without a fight.

LUV on NPR’s Chavez

ALBA UNITY GROWING IN LATIN AMERICA

Cuban news has a great article this morning on the recent ALBA summit in Venezuela.  The Bolivaran Alliance for the Americas was formed by several Latin American nations in response to the “free trade” agreements which benefit the 1% at the expense of the masses.  The American mass media does not allow a peek into alternative ways of thinking about economics, particularly involving systems which benefit the 99%, such as ALBA, so this sort of thing is mass media top secret.

This morning NPR did another of its hatchet jobs on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who was behind forming ALBA.  NPR spoke only of the Venezuelan opposition, without pointing out they are the oligarchs and ruling class of the past who are not supported by the masses (Chavez has a 57% approval rating in recent polling).  Nor did NPR point out that the US government financially supports this opposition to a democratic Venezuela (such reporting is why NPR gets funding from defense cheats, banksters and polluters).

We had to go to Russian news this morning to find a piece showing Chavez is currently working on a plan to get unemployment in Venezuela down to 3%.  Our own government does everything it can to keep unemployment high enough to drag down wages and benefits on behalf of our ruling Forces of Greed, one of the factors contributing to our growing inequality, and would never attempt to move toward realistic 3% unemployment levels.  They do identify the current 20% as 9%, by omitting a great many categories, such as those who’ve given up looking for a job, those in the world’s largest prison/jail population, and those working part time while desperately seeking full time employment.

LUV Newsletter: Action on GMOs

This note in the LUV Newsletter (one of our favorite sources for alternative news) mentions that 93 percent of Americans want their food to be so labeled if it contains genetically modified ingredients. It is in Europe, and they can’t give the stuff away. Here, because politicians are lapdogs to the food industry, and Monsanto in particular, 70 percent of the food in your grocery store contains GMOs. And even, as noted here, that extends to “natural” food stores like Whole Foods, thanks to those toadies.

TELL THE FDA — LABEL MY FOOD!

Here’s an action asking the FDA to responsibly label foods for Americans, like foods are labeled in other countries where consumers are protected. We endorse this action at LUV News and encourage readers to electronically sign on.

As with so many other issues, our government is on the side of the transnational corporations against the people, with polling showing that 93 percent of the American public want the federal government to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. Our ruling Forces of Greed know that if a food item is labeled ‘GMO’ nobody will buy it.

LUV Newsletter on Occupy…

THIS TIME, THE REVOLUTION IS TELEVISED

Here’s the link for the livestream of the Wall Street protest.  You can find out what the needs of dissidents there are and send them support in the form of everything from pizza to D cell batteries.

Chris Hedges made an appearance at the protest, remarking “The moment people come out and do this [kind of protest], the corporate state is terrified — and if you doubt me, look around you at the huge numbers of cops, and not only that but the kind of brutality the cops have visited on peaceful protesters.”

Mass media are censoring it, just as Mubarak did in Egypt — most Americans have no idea this is happening but would very much support the protest if they knew about it, since the masses overwhelmingly oppose the Wall Street bailout after the horrible attack Wall Street made on the working class, where millions of victims have lost homes, and millions more have lost jobs as a direct consequence of Wall Street gambling scams gone bad.

Congressional Pensions

As reported by Mark Karlin, editor of BuzzFlash, Senator Sherrod Brown this week introduced legislation that would ensure that any increase in the age of eligibility for Social Security is matched by a similar increase applied to the taxpayer-funded pension plans enjoyed by Congress. He noted earlier this year:

Currently, Members of Congress can begin collecting pensions as early as age 50, while working Americans cannot collect full Social Security benefits until age 66. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), retirement with an immediate, full pension is available to Members of Congress covered under FERS at age 62 or older with at least five years of federal service; at age 50 or older with at least 20 years of service; and at any age to Members with at least 25 years of service. For Members covered by CSRS, retirement with an immediate, full pension is available to Members age 60 or older with 10 years of service in Congress, or age 62 with five years of civilian federal service, including service in Congress.

Brown strongly opposes raising the retirement age for Social Security due to the high number of Ohioans who are engaged in physically demanding work – on a shop floor, production line, or farmland. Brown has long been active in efforts to protect Social Security from privatization, and has worked to ensure that seniors can continue to afford necessities like prescription drugs despite the lack of cost-of-living-adjustments (COLA) that Social Security recipients have faced for the past two years.

Mark says the bill’s passage is a long shot at best, adding:

Yet, if Brown’s bill is unlikely to pass, he considers legislation that would make deficit reduction begin on Capitol Hill — through reducing Congressional salaries by 10 percent — even a longer shot.

“I think some might [take the cut],” Brown said. “But I would guess probably a bill like that won’t pass.”

That is because as far as most of DC is concerned, including the White House, what’s good for the goose (cuts in pensions, salaries, and health care for the working class) is not good for the gander (the elected elites who enact those cuts on everyone but themselves and the wealthy.)

Sad Songs and Waltzes

This post from Politico (link on right) entitled “Survey raises electability questions for Perry” begins to tally the negatives that Governor Goodhair brings to the race. As Jim Hightower quipped, the higher the monkey climbs, the more people can see of his ass. And it’s not a pretty picture. According to the Bloomberg poll cited:

• Perry trails Barack Obama by 9 points in a general election match-up, while Romney trails by only 5 points.
• A plurality of general election voters already have an unfavorable impression of Perry: 41 percent view him unfavorably, while 32 percent view him favorably.
• Forty-five percent of respondents told the pollster they’d be less likely to vote for someone who questions global warming, versus 25 percent who said the opposite.
• Sixty-six percent of respondents said they’d be less likely to vote for someone who wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, versus 19 percent who said the opposite.
• Fifty percent said they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who says evolution is “unproven,” versus 20 percent who said the opposite.

And this doesn’t include any pushback to Perry’s Social Security views. The overt appeal to the Know Nothings in this country ain’t gettin’ ‘er done, or so it seems. It looks like drugstore cowboy ain’t sellin’ this year. Could be the electorate has had enough of our Texas yayhoos to last a lifetime. Or one hopes.