All-out Class Warfare!

Maine Gov. Paul LePage extends war on workers to war on art about workers

by Laura Clawson

Maine Gov. Paul “elected with 38% of the vote” LePage apparently isn’t content with going after collective bargaining rights for workers, raising pension contributions for public employees while exempting himself, and a host of other measures designed to drive down wages and working conditions.

No, his anti-worker crusade extends to artwork.

LePage has ordered a labor history mural removed from the walls of the state’s Department of Labor, and conference rooms renamed so they won’t honor labor leaders.

More at Daily Kos

A brief, and brutal, history of the Chamber of Commerce

by Joan McCarter

Bill McKibben, Kossack, author, and co-founder of 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change writes the definitive short history of the Chamber of Commerce:

From the outside, you’d think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce must know what it’s doing. It’s got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.

The article goes on:

It starts with the New Deal. The Chamber “accused Roosevelt of attempting to ‘Sovietize’ America; the chamber adopted a resolution ‘opposing the president’s entire legislative package.'” Opposition to FDR continued, shockingly, through the Lend-Lease program, designed to supply the allies with critical material to fight the Germans, and which brought a tremendous boon to American manufacturing. But more, the Chamber opposed American involvement in the war, the war which “triggered the greatest boom in America’s economic history.”

Bill McKibben:

But it’s precisely the kind of blinkered short-sightedness that has led the U.S. Chamber of Commerce astray over and over and over again. They spent the 1950s helping Joe McCarthy root out communists in the trade unions; in the 1960s they urged the Senate to “reject as unnecessary” the idea of Medicare; in the 1980s they campaigned against a “terrible 20” burdensome rules on business, including new licensing requirements for nuclear plants and “various mine safety rules.”

The article continues:

Now, of course, the Chamber fights everything from healthcare reform to environmental action. It’s in the environmental realm, McKibben argues, that the Chamber is shooting American business in the foot, yet again.

McKibben:

That’s why thousands and thousands of American businesses concerned about our energy future have already joined a new campaign, declaring that “The US Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me.” They want to draw a line between themselves and the hard-right ideological ineptitude that is the U.S. Chamber.

More at Daily Kos

Global Class Warfare: The Fight Joined

by Tasini

I suppose maybe I’m a bit weary of the “check out this new outrage by Scott Walker’s assault on the workers” so time to be positive, forward-looking, at least for a moment, by thinking about a really intriguing effort by the United Auto Workers to take a serious shot at organizing against the stupendous class warfare–by taking it around the globe.

So, in my opinion, and I do not think this is a particularly original thought, there is just no way to defeat the current state of class warfare by keeping the offense within our own borders. Our world is littered every day with examples of the global scale of class warfare–whether it be the worldwide financial pollution brought to us courtesy of Goldman Sachs-Citibank-Robert Rubin-AIG et al or the foolish wage-depressing assault via, among other things, middle-class destroying trade deals.

To which the UAW says:

The United Auto Workers outlined a new push to recruit U.S. workers at one or more foreign auto makers and will bolster the effort by training and sending activists abroad to organize rallies and protests in support of the union campaign.

On Tuesday, UAW leaders meeting here described plans to reach out to foreign unions and consumers in what would be their first major campaign since failed efforts in the last decade at Nissan Motor Co. and auto-parts supplier Denso Corp. They hope to be more successful by reaching out to foreign unions at the auto makers’ overseas plants and bringing pressure from prayer vigils, fasts or protests at dealerships.

And…

The UAW has set aside tens of millions of dollars from its strike fund to bankroll its campaign. International actions are to be coordinated with foreign unions and run by some three dozen student interns recruited globally, UAW officials said. When the interns return to their home countries after learning about the UAW efforts in the U.S., they’ll be expected to organize protests against the auto maker, UAW officials said.

The UAW also set up a team to identify weaknesses of foreign-owned auto makers that it can use to apply public pressure, according to a person familiar with the matter. This could include highlighting matters such as past safety problems.

More at Daily Kos

Neo (new) – Conservatism

With Republican leaders anxious to set an austere tone for their ascendance into the House majority this week, the lavish fundraiser scheduled for Tuesday night at a trendy Washington hotel to benefit a dozen GOP freshmen is not exactly the populist image leaders are anxious to project.

House Speaker-elect John Boehner, whose name was featured on the invitation, is nonetheless skipping the event at the W Hotel, where lobbyists, political action committee managers and others paying the $2,500 ticket price will be treated to a performance by country music star LeAnn Rimes (a $50,000 package includes a block of eight tickets and a “VIP suite” at the W).

“If incoming GOP freshmen were hoping to bring fiscal responsibility and ‘family values’ to Washington, they may have gotten off to an interesting start,” conservative blogger Matt Lewis noted, citing the event’s steep ticket prices, as well as Rimes’s confessed extramarital affair and her recent appearance in a “Sexy Santa” outfit at a gay men’s chorus Christmas performance.

and MORE…

Commie Dupe Billionaires behind “Grass Roots” Tea Party movement

The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement

The Koch family, America’s biggest financial backers of the Tea Party, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR.

Josef Stalin backs Tea Party

April 17, 2010 | The Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin’s godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.

The comrades were good to the Kochs. Today Koch Industries has grown into the second-largest private company in America. With an annual revenue of $100 billion, the company was just $6.3 billion shy of first place in 2008. Ownership is kept strictly in the family, with the company being split roughly between brothers Charles and David Koch, who are worth about $20 billion apiece and are infamous as the largest sponsors of right-wing causes. They bankroll scores of free-market and libertarian think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch family shelled out $25 million from 2005 to 2008 funding the “climate denial machine,” which means they outspent Exxon Mobile three to one.

I first learned about the Kochs in February 2009, when my colleague Mark Ames and I were looking into the strange origins of the then-nascent Tea Party movement. Our investigation led us again and again to a handful of right-wing advocacy groups directly tied to the Kochs. We were the first to connect the dots and debunk the Tea Party movement’s “grassroots” front, exposing it as billionaire-backed astroturf campaign run by free-market advocacy groups FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity, both of which are closely linked to the Koch brothers.

I first learned about the Kochs in February 2009, when my colleague Mark Ames and I were looking into the strange origins of the then-nascent Tea Party movement. Our investigation led us again and again to a handful of right-wing advocacy groups directly tied to the Kochs.* We were the first to connect the dots and debunk the Tea Party movement’s “grassroots” front, exposing it as billionaire-backed astroturf campaign run by free-market advocacy groups FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity, both of which are closely linked to the Koch brothers.

But the Tea Party movement — and the Koch family’s obscene wealth — go back more than half a century, all the way to grandpa Fredrick C. Koch, one of the founding members of the far-right John Birch Society which was convinced that socialism was taking over America through unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, the Kennedys and even Dwight D. Eisenhower.

More at AlterNet

Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?

February 27, 2009
By Mark Ames and Yasha Levine

Rick Santelli and the Tea Party

Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government.

Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.

But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal!!! (exclamation points mine –Max LaCosse) At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.

More on this article HERE…

No Shit: Powell says Iraq invasion was avoidable

By Kazuhiko Kusano, Washington Correspondent / Mainichi Daily News

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has told the Mainichi he believes the Iraq War — which began while he was in office in 2003 — could have been averted.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he described as one that could contain anthrax, during his presentation on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council, in New York on February 5, 2003.

Powell also stated during an Aug. 24 telephone interview that he regretted the false intelligence that led the United States to claim the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which Powell presented to the United Nations and which underpinned the U.S. case to invade Iraq.

“I will always be seen as the one who made the major public presentation of that intelligence. I regret that it was wrong but, at the same time, we had every reason to believe it was correct,” Powell said of the false WMD evidence.

In a 2005 interview on ABC television, Powell called the speech a “blot” on his reputation, though he also emphasized that he did not fabricate the intelligence — a point he was keen to reiterate to the Mainichi.

“It was the intelligence that was wrong. I did not make up this information; I did not invent it; I did not pull it out of the air. It was information that our intelligence community stood behind,” he stated.

In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution demanding Iraq submit to WMD inspections. Powell made his famous WMD speech at the U.N. in February 2003, and the United States launched its attack on the country on the 20th the following month. However, by 2005 the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that the WMD intelligence had been almost entirely false.

Original story at Mainichi Daily News

Bullshit! You fascist shill! Anyone who knew anything about the situation knew that the entire pretext for invading Iraq was false– before the fact– and that the entire war effort was just an opportunity for profiteering by the Vice President’s former corporation, Haliburton, robbing the United States’ public treasury to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars in no-bid contracts.

And the worst part is, beyond the tragic loss of lives, both American Servicemen and Iraqis, is the fact that we’re still paying for this fiasco in the form of record deficits, and the near-elimination of social services that are desperately needed, especially now that the economy is nearly irrevocably ruined.

(Just waiting now for our Chinese Communist creditors to evict us now…)

just one of many leading economic indicators

Meg Whitman Has to Pay Bloggers $15,000 a Month to Say Nice Things About Her

…increasingly, many bloggers are… secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.

“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”

In December of 2009, Red County received $20,000 from the Meg Whitman campaign, which has sent the site $15,000 a month since then.

The money is ostensibly for advertising, yet by conventional measures the numbers don’t add up. According to Quantcast, Red County reaches around 125,000 unique viewers per month. Two new media industry experts confirmed that, given such a readership, Whitman’s ad purchase is “ridiculously” expensive, surpassing the going market rate for such ads by 1,000 percent or more.

SEC Says New Financial Regulation Law Exempts it From Freedom of Information Act

So much for transparency.

Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities.” Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

Taxpayer Money Wasted on Keeping people from Dying Horrible Deaths!

Dialysis shortage creates expensive problem for city
By: Katie Worth
Examiner Staff Writer
July 20, 2010

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner (newspaper version, they apparently edited the web page because it sounded a little too heartless)

SAN FRANCISCO — Dialysis centers in The City increasingly exceed capacity, requiring some patients to be hospitalized for days or weeks — often on the public dime — while they wait for a spot at an outpatient clinic to receive the life-saving treatment.

Dialysis is a blood-filtration technique used on patients who face kidney failure. Because more than 100,000 Americans currently need kidney transplants, the wait for a donated organ can take years. In the meantime, patients are treated with dialysis to keep them alive. The typical treatment requires a patient to sit in a clinic for about three hours, three times a week, while their blood is filtered by a machine.

Since the 1970s, each of the clinic’s 13 chairs takes three shifts of dialysis patients. But in recent months, the capacity problem has become so bad that the nursing staff has had to extend the hours of the clinic three days a week to take a fourth patient, and now it’s asking for funding to expand the hours for three more days a week.

When patients need dialysis but there’s no room in the outpatient center, they can end up being hospitalized. Hospitalizing a patient for dialysis can cost taxpayers thousands of dollars a day, whereas receiving the three-hour blood-cleansing treatment costs just hundreds of dollars, according to hospital officials.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner

Goldman Sachs Bailout Hustle

At the height of the housing boom, Goldman was selling billions in bundled mortgage-backed securities — often toxic crap of the no-money-down, no-identification-needed variety of home loan — to various institutional suckers like pensions and insurance companies, who frequently thought they were buying investment-grade instruments. At the same time, in a glaring example of the perverse incentives that existed and still exist, Goldman was also betting against those same sorts of securities — a practice that one government investigator compared to “selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

more on Page 2

Treaty targets Internet, not knockoff purses

Margot Kaminski
SF Chronicle – Tuesday, April 27, 2010

On April 21, negotiators released the draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – a treaty containing the biggest changes to international intellectual property law since 1994. Negotiating governments have until now stonewalled attempts to access the agreement, which has prompted terrified speculation about border agents seizing laptops to search for downloaded songs. The draft reveals what many expected: The Internet, not counterfeit purses, is what is at issue here.

The agreement does three things:

1. It evinces zero respect for international law by arbitrarily creating new institutions and ignoring old ones.

2. It seeks to standardize Internet law to the most stringent standard available.

3. It lays the infrastructural groundwork for privacy and free-speech problems.

In international Intellectual Protocol law, developed countries push for strong IP protection because it benefits domestic industries. Developing nations, whose citizens are less able to afford premium prices for music or medicine, belatedly enter into institutions created by developed countries, and try to carve out exceptions that preserve basic human rights.

ACTA shows no respect for existing institutions: It instead creates an oversight committee of original treaty parties. ACTA’s existence demonstrates that when developed nations can’t get what they want out of existing institutions, they’re more than happy to bypass them.

The agreement attempts to apply parts of U.S. law retroactively to other countries, which won’t work. ACTA looks to export one of the most stringent copyright regimes, the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, without also creating uniform exceptions (called “fair use” in the United States).

ACTA also exports the U.S. standard for criminalizing Internet piracy – in the United States, if you’ve downloaded enough music, you can go to jail for that downloading alone. In other countries, to be imprisoned, you have to sell the infringing content on a “commercial scale.”

The most troubling feature of ACTA is how it intends to enforce these laws. ACTA creates an information-sharing investigative infrastructure easily abused by nefarious regimes.

International law has, until now, left room for individual countries to experiment with balancing concerns about Internet policy with IP incentives. ACTA, outside of existing institutions, aims to bully countries to a uniform standard under enforcement mechanisms that threaten privacy and freedom of speech.

Billionaire’s bank customers denied their deposits

“Stanford Coins & Bullion, a member of the Stanford Financial Group, their name as good as gold”
–Sean Hannity

BEN FOX, Associated Press:

ST. JOHN’S, Antigua – Panicky depositors were turned away from Stanford International Bank and some of its Latin American affiliates Wednesday, unable to withdraw their money after U.S. regulators accused Texas financier R. Allen Stanford of perpetrating an $8 billion fraud against his companies’ investors.

Some customers arrived in Antigua by private jet and were driven up the lushly landscaped driveway of the bank’s headquarters, only to be told that all assets have been frozen pending an investigation by Antiguan banking regulators.

“I don’t know what to think. I have my life savings here,” said Reinaldo Pinto Ramos, 48, a Venezuelan software firm owner who flew in by chartered plane from Caracas Wednesday with five other investors to check on their accounts. “We’re waiting to see some light.”

Banking regulators and politicians around the region are scrambling to contain the damage after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against the billionaire on Tuesday. Regional Director Rose Romero of the SEC’s Fort Worth office called it a “fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world.”

Sean Hannity: Allen Stanford Fan, Recommends Companies On Radio Show

Mention ‘Sean Hannity’ to Stanford Coins & Bullion and get a free guidebook.

Yup, that’s Stanford as in Stanford Financial Group, or Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire fugitive whose currently missing after being charged Tuesday in connection with a multi-billion-dollar fraud.

“Stanford Coins & Bullion, a member of the Stanford Financial Group, their name as good as gold,” Hannity intones on advertisements that regularly run on his radio show.

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard the advertisement,” said Michael Levine, a regular Hannity listener from Westchester County, New York.

He called the radio station on Tuesday to inform them Stanford had been implicated in what the SEC termed “massive, ongoing” fraud. “They told me they had no idea what I was talking about,” Levine told the Huffington Post.