Romney

[Peter Lemkin]

Romney: Americans Don't Die from Lack of Health Insurance

President Obama's challenger Mitt Romney is facing criticism over his remarks Thursday that uninsured Americans are able to have their healthcare paid for if they simply go to the hospital. Romney told the Columbus Dispatch newspaper people do not die from lack of insurance, saying: "No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it's paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don't have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don't have insurance." In fact, a 2009 study by researchers at Harvard Medical School found 45,000 people die in the United States each year due largely to a lack of health insurance and inability to access quality care. That comes out to one death every 12 seconds.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We're continuing our 100-city tour, back in New York. We'll be covering the presidential debate tomorrow night at Hofstra and expanding the debate Wednesday morning on Democracy Now!, bringing third-party candidates in to respond to the very same questions that are put to the major-party candidates.

With about three weeks to go before the November election, we're turning now to a new exposé that raises alarming questions about the ability of corporations to influence the voting decisions of their employees. In an article published by In These Times magazine, labor journalist Mike Elk examines the contents of a voter information packet that Koch Industries sent to tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific. The packet advised the employees on whom to vote for and warned them of the dire consequences to their families, their jobs and their country, should they choose to vote otherwise. Koch Industries is run by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who helped bankroll the tea party movement and dozens of other right-wing causes.

The cover letter, by Koch Industries president and chief operating officer, Dave Robertson, said, quote, "If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills," unquote.

The packet also included an anti-Obama editorial by Charles Koch and a pro-Romney editorial by David Koch. Koch Industries and other corporations are legally allowed to pressure their workers to adopt their political views at the ballot box because of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The ruling granted free speech rights to corporations, effectively removing regulations preventing employers from politically manipulating their workers.

In related news, Florida billionaire David Siegel recently informed his 7,000 employees that a vote for Obama would endanger their jobs. Meanwhile, the coal company Murray Energy allegedly coerced its employees into supporting Republican candidates.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we're joined by the author of the exposé, Mike Elk of In These Times. His piece is called "Koch Sends Pro-Romney Mailing to 45,000 Employees While Stifling Workplace Political Speech."

Mike Elk, welcome to Democracy Now! Please lay out your exposé.

MIKE ELK: Well, Amy, what's really incredible is, as a result of Citizens United, for the first time employers are allowed to talk to the people they employ about who they should vote in elections. Obviously, this is a conflict of interest. If your boss is pressuring you to vote for Romney, you might as well do it just tojust to win him over.

As well, you have a situation here where at the same time that Koch Industries is expanding its rights to talk to its employees about politics, it's decreasing the rights of employees to talk about politics on Facebook and other forms of social media. Koch Industries has implemented a new social media policy which says that workers can be fired for non-work-related things that affect Georgia-Pacific's brand or reputation. The Koch brothers, at the head of Georgia-Pacific, have taken thathave interpreted that to mean that if a worker posts something negative about the Koch brothers or their politics, that that worker can be fired. And several workers have been told about posting too much on Facebook.

Last year, Mark Ames and I wrote a similar article for The Nation about how the Kochs were campaigning in the run-up to the 2010 election. In that article, there was a warehouse worker named Travis McKinney who was quoted. McKinney later was pressured by his employers for talking to us and told that he shouldn't be doing things like that. When McKinney went in for a promotion, he got an excellent score on his evaluation, a 3.7 out of four. But the evaluation itself said that Travis talked too much about politics in the workplace. Obviously, this is quite a hypocrisy. While the Kochs talk about being libertarians who are in favor of expanding free speech rights, even giving free speech rights to corporations, they're in favor of actually limiting free speech rights for their actual employees.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you come about discovering this story, Mike?

MIKE ELK: I followed it. You know, last year, Mark Ames and I wrote a story in The Nation, and then I stayed with the workers. I talk with them. I kept in touch covering other issues. You know, we've kept on this for about eight months. And finally, we were able to get a hold of some documents, which we're releasing today, internal evaluations that show a worker was disciplined because of what they said, documents that show that Georgia-Pacific is enforcing this restrictive media policy. We were able to get a hold of this through this. But really, the credit for this story getting out there goes to the three brave workersJim Pierce, Travis McKinney and Larry Wagonerwho were quoted in the story. All three of these workers could be fired, perhaps even legally, for revealing confidential information about Koch Industries. So, I mean, these are the real heroes of the story.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how that worker was disciplined and the whole social media policy and code of conduct that you discovered?

MIKE ELK: Yeah. Well, Travis McKinney, what happened is, you know, in a lot of different situations, Travis would be told by his boss that they're monitoring his Facebook, that he's putting up too much about the Koch Industries and that they don't like that. When he went for his evaluation, again, like I said, he scored a 3.7 out of four, but he was denied a promotion, and it said in his evaluation that, you know, he talked about politics too much in the workplace. Obviously, you know, for Travis's sake, it felt like he was being singled out for his views.

With the social media policy, this is really incredibly restrictive, this code of conduct and the social media policy. It says that a worker can be fired for completely non-work-related things. First off, the union feels the social media policy is illegal, because, one, social media policies, as the National Labor Relations Act defines it, have to be negotiated with the union, and this social media policy was imposed unilaterally.

Two, they feel that it infringes upon the right of unions to talk about matters that they need to in order to fight for unions. However, I talked with some legal experts, even pro-union legal experts, that say that this is a real gray area, that, for instance, if a worker posts something about the anti-labor policies about Koch Industries, they would not be fired by that; they're legally protected. But if, say, a worker wanted to post something about, you know, Kochs' investing in fracking or the Keystone pipeline, they could be fired. That's not protected speech. So this is a real gray area.

And the bigger issue is that, you know, the National Labor Relations process, where you hear these cases when workers are fired for engaging in union activity, you know, a worker could be fired and be out of a job for a year and a half before they get their job back. And so, this is a big risk for most workers to take, and most aren't willing to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Mike

MIKE ELK: So a lot of folks keep their heads down.

AMY GOODMAN: Mike Elk, last year, the website ThinkProgress.org published video showing Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown thanking conservative billionaire David Koch for his campaign donations and asking for more money in 2012. The video was shot at a recent dedication of MIT's David H. Koch Integrative Cancer Institute.

SEN. SCOTT BROWN: It made a difference, and I can certainly use it again. And obviously, the

DAVID KOCH: When are you running for the next term?

SEN. SCOTT BROWN: '12.

DAVID KOCH: Oh, OK.

SEN. SCOTT BROWN: I'm in the cycle right now. We're already banging away.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Mike Elk?

MIKE ELK: Well, obviously, you know, the Kochs have a lot of power, and, you know, Scott Brown needed them in order to win. It's really funny, because in this packet of information, there is an op-ed from Charles Koch in which he talks about how he gets so upset about CEOs who lack courage to pursue public politics, that fold under pressure. And heyou know, he labels asyou know, he says CEOs who abandoned ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing model legislation shophe says, you know, CEOs that have abandoned that organization in the wake of some of their controversies lack courage, and that he's willing to have that kind of courage to go forward. And this is what they see. And clearly, you know, the Kochs, in terms of this workplace political intimidation, are starting a trend, as we see with places across the boardwe're going to see more and more pressuring of workers in the workplace directly from their bosses and supervisors, as moreas more employeesemployers catch on to the fact that they can do this.

AMY GOODMAN: Mike, the largest privately held coal company in the nation, Murray Energy, has allegedly coerced its employees into supporting Republican candidates. The company reportedly told workers that attending a pro-Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid. However, Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore denied the charges when speaking to WWVA radio host David Blomquist.

DAVID BLOMQUIST: Let me ask you this: were workers forced to attend this event?

ROB MOORE: David, there were no workers that were forced to attend the event. We had managers that communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend the event. We had a pre-registration list. Employees were asked to put their name on a pre-registration list because they could not get into the event unless they were pre-registered and had a name tag to enter the premises. We had people that did not show up that day, and there were no consequences or repercussions taken against any employee that did not attend the Romney event.

AMY GOODMAN: Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore. Mike Elk, can you expand on this?

MIKE ELK: Yeah. My friend Alec MacGillis at The New Republic did a story where it really disputes this account, and many workers do say that they were forced to attend this event unpaid. But more gravely than that, Alec gets into how the CEO of Murray Energy, Robert Murray, was pressuring workers to donate to GOP candidates. They're the second-largest donor to the House speaker, John Boehner. And Alec gets intohe reveals documents and letters from the CEO of the company singling out people who aren't giving money and pressuring them to show up for these banquets. He even has these spreadsheets where they show who doesn't have money and who does so far that year. And, you know, this is a big trend.

And, you know, sure, maybe Murray Energy isn't exactly telling people they're fired, but imagine you work in a workplace and your boss says, "Hey, we're all supporting this Republican candidate, and we're volunteering for him this weekend. Are you going to come with us?" Now, if you're a worker who wants a raise, you're going to do whatever your boss tells you. So, certainly, there's nothing to be gained by not going along with your boss on politics, so the idea that an employer doesn't naturally have coercive power when discussing politics with a worker is just ridiculous.

[Adele Edisen]

Romney Exposed

Video: 40:58 minutes long

http://youtu.be/s9QA5B6U86s

It examines Romney's utter-secrecy in all his financial dealings always-; it details his involvement with CIA money laundering and death squads, the 9-11 attacks, and the murder of US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

John Hankey

[Peter Lemkin]

John Nichols on October 16, 2012 - 7:48 AM ET
 
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the veteran Democratic leader who mentored a young Barack Obama and remains one of the president's closest allies, was not planning to be at Obama's side for today's final round of debate preparation.

Rather, Durban was headed back home to Illinois for a meeting with workers at the Sensata Technologies plant in Freeport, where 170 employees are slated to lose their jobs to outsourcing before the end of the year.

Sensata, which for decades has produced state-of-the-art sensors and controls for Ford and General Motors, is precisely the sort of high-tech operation that a country looking to compete in the global economy of the twenty-first century would want to maintain as a domestic manufacturer. So why are the jobs moving to China?

Because Bain Capital owns the company, and Bain is committed to the industrial development of Chinese provincesnot to states like Illinois. That's not what most Americans would identify as a smart choice for the nation's futurelet alone "economic patriotism."

But that is how Bain, which got its operating ethos from former CEO Mitt Romney, operates. Romney still profits mightily from his Bain connectionas The New York Times and numerous business journals have well documentedand he remains closely tied to current Bain executives. So if anyone could get Bain to rethink the outsourcing of the Sensata jobs, it's Mitt Romney.

At least, that's what Illinoisans think.

In July, the Freeport City Council voted unanimously to ask Romney to come to Freeport, meet the workers and intervene with Bain on their behalf. Freeport Mayor George Gaulrapp even offered to host a debate between Romney and President Obama at the local historic site where Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas once debated.

In September, Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn visited Freeport and issued a similar call.

Now, on the day of the critical second debate between the presidential candidates (in Hempostead, New York, rather than Freeport), Durbin is headed to the community workers have dubbed "Bainport."

And rightly so.

What's happening in Freeport is a small piece of a big story: that of outsourcing technology jobsthe high-tech positions that should be powering America's economic renewalfrom the United States to China. And that issue ought to be on the agenda for Tuesday's debate.

As Paul Gaulrapp, a thirty-three-year employee at the factory that was once honorably operated by Honeywell, says: "It's time to draw a line in the sand on the outsourcing of good, American jobs."

Moderator Candy Crowley, a savvy CNN correspondent who cannot be unaware of the Freeport fight, should raise the issue.

If she does not, President Obama can and should put it in the mix. Obama does not need to abandon his medium-cool persona to define the direction of tonight's debate. He just has to raise the right issues. He can do that by putting a human face on the issue of outsourcingand Bain Capitalism.

Few stories are more instructive with regard to America's outsourcing crisisScott Paul of the Alliance for American Manufacturing says the US has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000, overwhelmingly to China, as 50,000 factories have closedthan that of the Sensata workers in Freeport. And none does more to highlight the Republican presidential nominee's record of promoting job growth… in China.

Indeed, as the United Steelworkers union illustrates with a dramatic new video on the outsourcing fight: "Mitt Romney and Bain Capital are profiting by selling out American workers [and] shipping US jobs to China."

Romney should be confronted on this issue. He should have to answer questions and provide explanations. But he won't do that in Freeport. Indeed, he has studiously avoided the towneven when a June bus trip across southern Wisconsin put him in close proximity to the northern Illinois community.

Mitt Romney's "Every Town Counts" bus tour scrupulously avoided towns where Romney's Bain Capital continues to put the hurt on American workers.

When Romney stopped in Paul Ryan's Janesville, Wisconsin, and then traveled to Dubuque, Iowa, on Monday, June 18, he was just up the road from Freeport.

But Romney did not stop in Freeport, a town that like Janesville and Dubuque has been hard hit by trade and fiscal policies that encourage corporations to shutter US factories and ship jobs overseasand that has been even harder hit by speculators who buy up factories, strip the assets and close them.

On the day Romney was busing across the region, Sensata workers gathered in front of the factory with handmade signs that read:

"Romney! Stop Bain Outsourcing to China"

"Mitt Romney Save Our Jobs"

"Romney: Instead of talking about JOBS, just don't ship MINE to China"

The workers had every reason to be upset with Bainand with Romney.

Their plant has always been innovative and productive. It was owned for decades by Texas Instruments, and then by Honeywell, before being sold in 2010 to Sensata Technologies Holding, N.V, a firm based in the Netherlands but majority-owned by Bain Capital.

The workers at the plant pleaded with Romney to make a slight detour on his bus trip and take a look at the devastation being caused by Bain's machinations at a plant where many of them had been employed for more than thirty years.

Even then, the plant's operations were rapidly shrinking as crews removed safety equipment from machines that were being prepared for shipment from Illinois to China.

"This used to be a very high-volume plant and now it's pretty much a ghost town… and by the end of the year it will be a ghost town", Sensata employee Cheryl Randecker told local reporters.

Had Romney come to Freeport, he would have heard how much Bain's approach has harmed not just the Sensata workers but Freeport and counties along the Illinois-Wisconsin stateline that have suffered more than their share of plant closings.

"Sensata is moving forward with the process of relocating jobs from their operations in Freeport to China," explains John Blum, the chairman of the Stephenson County Board.

In addition to the "significant human toll on the more than 140 families that will be affected by this loss of jobs and financial security," says Blum, "The loss of these jobs will have a tremendous impact on our regional economy."

That's a story Mitt Romney definitely does not want to focus attention on.

So his bus didn't stop in Freeport.

Romney will not go near Freeport.

But that does not mean he can or should be able to avoid the issues raised Bain's outsourcing of the Sensata jobs.

He should be asked a simple question in tonight's debate, and on the campaign trail going forward:

Is talk about renewing the American economy credible coming from a man who continues to profit from the plant closings, the layoffs and the outsourcing practices that are crude byproducts of Bain Capitalism?

For more on Romney's support of free trade at the expense of American workers, check out John Nichols on Romney and NAFTA.

[Peter Lemkin]

Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza
Greg Palast
October 17, 2012
 
This investigation was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and by the Puffin Foundation. Elements of it appear in Palast's new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (Seven Stories). Research assistance by Zach D. Roberts, Ari Paul, Nader Atassi and Eric Wuestewald.
 
Mitt Romney's opposition to the auto bailout has haunted him on the campaign trail, especially in Rust Belt states like Ohio. There, in September, the Obama campaign launched television ads blasting Romney's November 2008 New York Times op-ed, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." But Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailoutand a few of Romney's most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys', were astronomicalmore than 3,000 percent on their investment.

It all starts with Delphi Automotive, a former General Motors subsidiary whose auto parts remain essential to GM's production lines. No bailout of GMor Chrysler, for that mattercould have been successful without saving Delphi. So, in addition to making massive loans to automakers in 2009, the federal government sent, directly or indirectly, more than $12.9 billion to Delphiand to the hedge funds that had gained control over it.

One of the hedge funds profiting from that bailout
$1.28 billion so faris Elliott Management, directed by 
Paul Singer. According to The Wall Street Journal, Singer has given more to support GOP candidates$2.3 millionthan anyone else on Wall Street this election season. His personal giving is matched by that of his colleagues at Elliott; collectively, they have donated $3.4 million to help elect Republicans this season, while giving only $1,650 to Democrats. And Singer is influential with the GOP presidential candidate; he's not only an informal adviser but, according to the Journal, his support was critical in helping push Representative Paul Ryan onto the ticket.

Singer, whom Fortune magazine calls a "passionate defender of the 1%," has carved out a specialty investing in distressed firms and distressed nations, which he does by buying up their debt for pennies on the dollar and then demanding payment in full. This so-called "vulture investor" received $58 million on Peruvian debt that he snapped up for $11.4 million, and $90 million on Congolese debt that he bought for a mere $20 million. In the process, he's built one of the largest private equity firms in the nation, and over decades he's racked up an unusually high average return on investments of 14 percent.

Other GOP presidential hopefuls chased Singer's endorsement, but Mitt chased Singer with his own checkbook, investing at least $1 million with Elliott through Ann Romney's blind trust (it could be far more, but the Romneys have declined to disclose exactly how much). Along the way, Singer gained a reputation, according to Fortune, "for strong-arming his way to profit." That is certainly what happened at Delphi.

* * *

Delphi, once the Delco unit of General Motors, was spun off into a separate company in 1999. Alone, Delphi foundered, declaring bankruptcy in 2005, after which vulture hedge funds, led by Silver Point Capital, began to buy up the company's old debt. Later, as the nation's financial crisis accelerated, Singer's Elliott bought Delphi debt, as did John Paulson & Co. John Paulson, like Singer, is a $1 million donor to Romney. Also investing was Third Point, run by Daniel Loeb, who was once an Obama supporter but who this summer hosted a $25,000-a-plate fundraiser for Romney and personally donated about $500,000 to the GOP.

As Delphi was in bankruptcy, making few payments, the bonds were junk, considered toxic by the banks holding them. The hedge funds were able to pick up the securities for a song; most of Elliott's purchases cost just 20 cents on the dollar of their face value.

By the end of June 2009, with the bailout negotiations in full swing, the hedge funds, under Singer's lead, used their bonds to buy up a controlling interest in Delphi's stock. According to SEC filings, they paid, on average, an equivalent of only 67 cents per share.

Just two years later, in November 2011, the Singer syndicate took Delphi public at $22 a share, turning an eye-popping profit of more than 3,000 percent. Singer's fund investors scored a gain of $904 million, all courtesy of the US taxpayer. But that's not all. In the year since Delphi began trading publicly, its stock has soared 45 percent. Loeb's gains so far for Third Point: $390 million. The gains for Silver Point, headed by two Goldman Sachs alums: $894 million. John Paulson's fund, which has already sold half its holdings, has a $2.6 billion gain. And Singer's funds and partners, combining what they've sold and what they hold, have $1.29 billion in profits, about forty-four times their original investment.

Yet without taking billions in taxpayer bailout fundsand slashing worker pensionsthe hedge funds' investment in Delphi would not have been worth a single dollar, according to calculations by GM and the US Treasury.

Altogether, in direct and indirect payouts, the government padded these investors' profits handsomely. The Treasury allowed GM to give Delphi at least $2.8 billion of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to keep Delphi in business. GM also forgave $2.5 billion in debt owed to it by Delphi, and $2 billion due from Singer and company upon Delphi's exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The money GM forgave was effectively owed to the Treasury, which had by then become the majority owner of GM as a result of the bailout. Then there was the big one: the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation took over paying all of Delphi's retiree pensions. The cost to the taxpayer: $5.6 billion. The bottom line: the hedge funds' paydays were made possible by a generous donation of $12.9 billion from US taxpayers.

* * *

One of President Obama's first acts in office, in February 2009, was to form the Auto Task Force with the goal of saving GM, Chrysler, their suppliers and, most important, auto industry jobs. Crucial to the plan was saving Delphi, which then employed more than 25,000 union workers.

Obama hired Steven Rattner, himself a millionaire hedge fund manager, to head the task force that would negotiate with the troubled firms and their creditors to avoid the collapse of the entire industry. In Rattner's memoir of the affair, Overhaul, he describes a closed-door meeting held in March 2009 to resolve Delphi's fate. He writes that Delphi, now in the possession of its hedge fund creditors, told the Treasury and GM to hand over $350 million immediately, "because if you don't, we'll shut you down." His explanation was corroborated by Delphi's chief financial officer, John Sheehan, who said in a sworn deposition in July 2009 that the hedge fund debt holders backed up their threat with "an analysis of the cost to GM if Delphi were unwilling or unable to provide supply to GM," forcing a "shutdown." It would take "years and tens of billions" for GM to replace Delphi's parts. At that bleak moment, GM had neither. The automaker had left the inventory of its steering column and other key components in Delphi's hands. If Delphi laid siege to GM's parts supply, the bailout would fail and GM would have to be liquidated or sold offas would another Delphi dependent, Chrysler.

Rattner could not believe that Delphi's managementnow effectively under the hedge funders' controlwould "want to be perceived as holding GM hostage at such a precarious economic moment." One Wall Street Journal analyst suggested that Singer was treating Delphi "like a third world country." Rattner likened the subsidies demanded by Delphi's debt holders to "extortion demands by the Barbary pirates."

Romney has slammed the bailout as a payoff to the auto workers union. But that certainly wasn't true for the bailout of Delphi. Once the hedge funders, including Singera deep-pocketed right-wing donor and activist who serves as chair of the conservative, anti-union Manhattan Institutetook control of the firm, they rid Delphi of every single one of its 25,200 unionized workers.

Of the twenty-nine Delphi plants operating in the United States when the hedge funders began buying up control, only four remain, with not a single union production worker. Romney's "job creators" did create jobsin China, where Delphi now produces the parts used by GM and other major automakers here and abroad. Delphi is now incorporated overseas, leaving the company with 5,000 employees in the United States (versus almost 100,000 abroad).

Third Point's Daniel Loeb, whose net worth of $1.3 billion owes much to his share in the Delphi windfall, told his fund's backers this past July that Delphi remains an excellent investment because it has "virtually no North American unionized labor" and, thanks to US taxpayers, "significantly smaller pension liabilities than almost all of its peers."

* * *

Another outcome may have been possible. In June 2009, the Treasury and GM announced a bailout deal they'd crafted over months with the cooperation of the United Auto Workers. GM would take back control of Delphi via a joint venture with Platinum Equity, a buyout firm led by billionaire Tom Gores, a self-described "Michigan man" who grew up in the shadow of Delphi's Flint plant.

The final Platinum plan, according to Delphi's official statement posted on Marketwire in June 2009, lists plants in fourteen locations slated for closing, which would have left several of Delphi's plants still in business, still unionizedand still in the United States. Crucially, the deal would have returned key Delphi operations, including the production of steering columns, directly to GM.

The hedge funders stunned Delphi by refusing to accept the Platinum plan. Harshly criticizing it as a "sweetheart deal," they demanded 45 cents on the dollar for the debt bonds they had bought on the cheapmore than double what the Treasury-brokered Platinum deal would pay.

Then the Singer-led debt holders swooped in. After the Platinum deal was announced, Elliott Management quietly tripled its holdings of Delphi bonds, purchased at just one-fifth of their face value. By joining forces with Silver Point, Paulson and Loeb, Singer now controlled Delphi's fate.

Gores, Delphi and UAW officials declined to respond to queries about the deal on the record, but the sworn deposition by Delphi CFO Sheehan (confidential then, but later posted on Scribd.com) lets us in on the tense negotiations culminating in a twenty-hour showdown between Delphi, GM, the UAW, the Auto Task Force and the US pension agency, on the one hand, and Singer's hedge fund group, on the other. Delphi said it would dump the Platinum deal if the hedge funds would agree to terms that would take care of all stakeholders, including the following stipulation: "Agree on plan structure to maximize job preservation."

The hedge funders said no, since they had a billion-dollar ace up their sleeve. According to Sheehan, Singer and company's controlling interest allowed them to force the bankruptcy judge to hold an auction for all of Delphi's stock. The debt holders outbid the Michigan Man's team, offering $3.5 billion. But it wasn't $3.5 billion in cash: under the rules of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, debtors-in-possession may bid the face value of their bonds rather than their current market value, which at the time was significantly lower. Under the Platinum deal, Delphi would have had much more in real money for operations: $250 million in cash from Gores, another $250 million in credit, and $3.1 billion in "exit financing" from GM, all of it backed up by TARP. Still, under Chapter 11 rules, the Platinum bid was technically lower. And that's how Singer's fundswhich included the Romneys' investmentcame to buy Delphi for the equivalent of only 67 cents a share.

Rattner and GM, embarrassingly outmaneuvered, tried to put a good face on it. As Rattner wrote in his memoir, "In truth we didn't care who got Delphi as long as GM could extricate itself from the continual drain on its finances and assure itself of a reliable supply of parts."

* * *

Even before the hedge funds won their bid for Delphi's stock, they were already squeezing the parts supplier and its workforce. In February 2009, Delphi, claiming a cash shortage, unilaterally terminated health insurance for its nonunion pensioners. But according to Rattner, the Treasury's Task Force uncovered foggy accounting hiding the fact that the debt holders had deliberately withheld millions of dollars in cash sitting in Delphi accounts. Even after this discovery, the creditors still refused to release the funds.

The savings to the hedge fund billionaires of dropping retiree insurance was peanuts$70 million a yearcompared with the profits they later extracted from Delphi. But the harm to Delphi retirees was severe. Bruce Naylor of Kokomo, Indiana, had been forced into retirement at the age of 54 in 2006, when Delphi began to move its plants overseas. Naylor's promised pension was slashed 40 percent, and his health insurance and life insurance were canceled. Though he had thirty-six years of experience under his belt as an engineer with GM and Delphi, he couldn't find another job as an engineerand he doesn't know a single former co-worker who has found new employment in his or her field, either. Naylor ended up getting work at a local grocery store. That job gone, he now sells cars online for commission, bringing in one-fifth of what he earned before he was laid off from Delphi.

Even with his wife Judy's income as a nurse, it hasn't been enough: the Naylors just declared bankruptcy, and their home is in foreclosure.

After the hedge fund takeover of Delphi, the squeeze on workers intensified through attacks on their pensions. During its years of economic trouble, Delphi had been chronically shorting payments to its pension fundsand by July 2009, they were underfunded by $7 billion. That month, Singer's hedge fund group won the bid for control of Delphi's stock and made clear they would neither make up the shortfall nor pay any more US worker pensions. Checkmated by the hedge funders, the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation agreed to take over Delphi's pension payments. The PBGC would eat the shortfall.

With Delphi's new owners relieved of its healthcare and pension obligations, its debts to GM and its union contracts
and now loaded with subsidies from GM funded by TARPthe company's market value rose from zero to approximately 
$10.5 billion today.

* * *

But there was still a bit of unfinished business: President Obama needed to be blamed for the pension disaster. In a television ad airing in swing states since September, one retired Delphi manager says, "The Obama administration decided to terminate my pension, and I took a 40 percent reduction in my pension."

Another retiree, Mary Miller, says, "I really struggle to pay for the basics…. I would ask President Obama why I had no rights, and he had all the rights to take my pension awayand never ever look back and say, Not only did I take it from Mary Miller, I took it from 20,000 other people.'"

These people are real. But it's clear that these former workers, now struggling to scrape by, were hardly in the position to put together $7 million in ad buys to publicize their plight. The ads were paid for by Let Freedom Ring, a 501©(4) nonprofit advocacy organization partially funded by Jack Templeton Jr., a billionaire evangelical whose foundation has sponsored lectures at the Manhattan Institute (the anti-union think tank whose board of directors includes not only Singer but Loeb). The ads also conveniently leave out the fact that the law sets specific ceilings on what the PBGC is allowed to pay retireesregardless of what they were originally owed.

In June 2011, Charles and David Koch hosted a group of multimillionaires at a retreat in Vail, Colorado. In secret recordings obtained by investigator Brad Friedman, the host, Charles Koch, thanks Singer and Templeton, among others, for each donating more than $1 million to the Koch brothers' 2012 anti-Obama election war chest.

Of course, it wasn't Obama who refused to pay the Delphi pensions; it was Paul Singer and the other hedge funds controlling Delphi. The salaried workers' pensions were, after all, an obligation of Delphi's owners, not the government. Delphi's stockholdersthe Romneys includedhad one easy way to rectify the harm to these pensioners, much as GM did for its workers: just pay up.

Making good on the full pensions for salaried workers would cost Delphi a one-time charge of less than $1 billion. This year, Delphi was flush with $1.4 billion in cash
meaning its owners could have made the pensioners whole 
and still cleared a profit. Instead, in May, Delphi chose to use most of those funds to take over auto parts plants in Asia at 
a cost of $972 millionpurchased from Bain Capital.

* * *

That leaves one final question: Exactly how much did the Romneys make off the auto bailout? Queries to the campaign and the Romneys' trustee have gone unanswered. And Romney has yet to disclose the crucial year of his tax returns, 2009. But whatever the tally, it was one sweet deal. The Romneys were invested with Elliott Management by the end of 2010, before Delphi was publicly traded. So, in effect, they got Delphi stock at Singer's initial dirt-cheap price. When Delphi's owners took the company public in November 2011, the Romneys were inand they hit the jackpot.

In their 2011 and 2012 Federal Financial Disclosure filing, Ann Romney's trust lists "more than $1 million" invested with Elliott. This is the description for all of her big investmentsthe minimal disclosure required by law. (Had Romney kept the holding in his own name, he would have had to reveal if his investment with Singer had made more than $50 million.)

It is reasonable to assume that Singer treated the Romneys the same as his other investors, with a third of their portfolio invested in Delphi by the time of the 2011 initial public offering. This means that with an investment of at least $1 million, their smallest possible gain when Delphi went public would have been $10.2 million, plus another $10.2 million for each million handed to Singerall gains made possible by the auto bailout.

But that's just the beginning. Since the November 2011 IPO, Delphi's stock has roared upward, boosting the Romneys' Delphi windfall from $10.2 million to $15.3 million for each million they invested with Singer.

But what if the Romneys invested a bit more with Singer: let's say a mere 3 percent of their reported net worth, or 
$7.5 million? (After all, ABC News reportedand Romney didn't denythat he invested "a huge chunk of his vast wealth" with Singer.) Then their take from the auto bailout so far would reach a stunning $115 million.

The Romneys' exact gain, however, remains nearly 
invisibleand untaxedbecause Singer cashed out only a fragment of the windfall in 2011. And the Singer-led hedge funds have been able to keep almost all of Delphi's profits untaxed 
by moving Delphi's incorporation from Troy, Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey, a tax haven off the coast of France.

The Romneys might insist that the funds were given to Singer, Mitt's key donor, only through Ann's blind trust. But as Mitt Romney said some years ago of Ted Kennedy, "The blind trust is an age-old ruse, if you will. Which is to say, you can always tell a blind trust what it can and cannot do." Romney, who reminds us often that he was CEO of a hedge fund, can certainly read Elliott Management's SEC statements, and he knows Ann's trust is invested heavily in a fund whose No. 1 stake is with Delphi.

Nevertheless, even if the Romneys were blind to their initial investment in Elliott, they would have known by the beginning of 2010 that they had a massive position in Delphi and would make a fortune from the bailout and TARP funds. Delphi is not a minor investment for Singer; it is his main holding. To invest in Elliott is essentially a "Delphi play": that is, investing with Singer means buying a piece of the auto bailout.

Mitt Romney may indeed have wanted to let Detroit die. But if the auto industry was going to be bailed out after all, the Romneys apparently couldn't resist getting in on a piece of 
the action.

[Peter Lemkin]

GREG PALAST: Detroit, Motown, Motor City. In 2009, the auto industry's collapse and bailouts filled the news.

MARK CARLSON: General Motors, the Detroit stalwart, once the world's largest corporation, died today.

NEIL CAVUTO: Bailout bummer, the Obama administration

JONATHAN KARL: "Bailout" is a dirty word these days.

BETTY LIU: Bailout of the auto industry.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: All of the money that has been sunk into GM and Chrysler returned.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Just over two months ago, I spoke with you in this same spot about the challenges facing our auto industry, and I laid out what needed to be done to save two of America's most storied automakers: General Motors and Chrysler.

GREG PALAST: As part of a massive government bailout, U.S. taxpayers paid $12 billion to save auto parts maker Delphi Corporation. Out of that taxpayer money, three billionaires and their partners took in a profit of over $4 billion. One big winner, with a profit of over 4,000 percent, were the billionaires' silent partners, Ann and Mitt Romney. The Romneys made at least $15 million, and as much as $115 million.

Our investigation began in Africa in the Congo. This is Greg Palast reporting. We are hunting for a vulture, a so-called vulture fund financier, this man, Paul Singer. Singer's vulture fund seized $90 million out of foreign aid given the Congo, which could have been used to end a cholera epidemic. Singer's vulture tactics are now outlawed in England and all over the world, but not in the U.S.A., certainly not here in Detroit, where we found Singer's vulture fund feasting on the corpse of another victim, the once-world-leading Delco auto parts division of General Motors.

DELCO AD: Power that can't get old before it's sold. Delco dry charge battery, made by the Delco-Remy Division of General Motors.

GREG PALAST: As Delco's biggest customers, GM and Chrysler, collapsed, Delco, now named Delphi, went bust. Down swooped the vultures. The vulture funds bought Delphi for just 67 cents a share. Bloated by $12 billion in taxpayer auto bailout subsidies, the shares blew up from 67 cents to $22 a share. The auto task force chief called it "extortion." Extortion paid big time. So far, Romney and partners have pocketed over $4 billion. Then the billionaires gave Romney a million dollars each for the Republican campaigns. Nevertheless, Romney accused Obama of conflicts.

MITT ROMNEY: This is serious conflict of interest. This ought to be a big story. And I don't think there areI think there are a number of people on theamong the president's team that don't want that story to get out. We want to make sure it did.

GREG PALAST: Romney said he was opposed to the bailout.

MITT ROMNEY: I wrote an op-ed in the paper, and I said, "Absolutely not. Don't write a check for $50 billion."

GREG PALAST: But these documents reveal that a government bailout check was in fact cashed by none other than Ann Romney. It says that Ann Romney had a hunk of Mitt's vast fortune in Elliott Management, Paul Elliott Singer's vulture fund. Working our way between the limousines in front of his office, we wanted to ask Mr. Singer about his special financial deal with the Romneys. But he turned us down. The Romney campaign refuses to tell us exactly how much they made from the bailout, nor reveal their 2009 taxes.

ANN ROMNEY: We've given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and about how we live our life.

GREG PALAST: To cover up their payday and avoid taxes, the vulture funds have moved the headquarters of Delphi from Michigan to Jerseynot New Jersey, but the Isle of Jersey off the coast of France, a notorious tax haven.

Governor Romney wrote, "Let Detroit go bankrupt." And it did. Of the 25,000 UAW members at Delphi, every single one lost their job. Delphi once had 29 factories in the U.S., now just one. Today, GM still gets its parts from Delphi, shipped from the plants that the Romney hedge funds have moved to the People's Republic of China.

For Democracy Now!, this is Greg Palast reporting.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast's exposé is part of a film-in-progress called Romney's Bailout Bonanza. Greg joins us in New York, author of a number of books, including recently released New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps. His piece is just out today in The Nation, called "Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza: How He Made Millions from the Rescue of Detroit."

Greg Palast, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, lay it out for us.

GREG PALAST: Oh, it's one of the creepiest stories I've investigated in a long time, Amy. Mitt Romney, through Ann Romney's blind trustnot so blind, they could see exactly where the money was goinggave their money to Paul "The Vulture" Singer, a guy you and I have been following on Democracy Now! for five years. Singer, with two of his hedge fund buddies, bought up the auto parts division of General Motors for only 67 cents a share. They were able to turn 67 cents a share into $22 a share by threatening GM and the U.S. Treasury with a complete shutdown of the auto industry. They had complete control of all the steering wheels and steering columns of every car that was being made in America. GM would have been liquidated. They literally threatened to shut down GM. And so, theythe government simply allowed GM to pay them $12 billion. About half of that was straight from the U.S. Treasury in a takeover of Delphi's pension fund.

Once they got the moneyonce they got the money, they eliminated 28 of 29 auto plants in the U.S. They movedthey eliminated every single job of every UAW member; 25,200 UAW members all lost their jobs. Almost every plant was then moved by the Romney group to China. Delphi is making a fortune today. So you have 25,000 workers who lost their jobs to China. Three hedge fund managers made at least $4 billion, $4.2 billion. And the Romneys have made at least 15, but the evidence suggests that it's more like $115 million for the Romneys, about a 4,000 percent profit.

What we can't get from them at this moment, this may be the reason why they are not releasing their 2009 taxes, because that would give us a better hint. Unfortunately, they've not only moved the company operations to China, but they've moved their incorporation of the auto parts division of General Motors from Troy, Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey in the Mediterranean Sea, which hides their taxes and also, of course, hides their accounts. So thatthat's the story.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg, how did you get this information?

GREG PALAST: Well, I've been, you know, tracking Paul "The Vulture" Singer and his hedge fund for five years, as you saw, for Democracy Now!, from the Congo to England to South America. And I was stunned, absolutely stunned, to find out that the Romneys had given what ABC called a vast chunk of their money to Elliott Management. But it was well hidden. It not only went through Ann Romney's blind trust, but then the blind trust was put in a special limited liability partnership with Paul Singer, which they then hid their levels of investments. Plus, by putting it in Ann Romney's nameand remember, every dime that Ann Romney has comes from her husbandby Mitt moving his money to Ann Romney, they didn't have to declare exactly how much money they made here, only that it was more than a million. But we were able to calculate that it was at least $15 million, and more likely $115 million.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about Mitt Romney opposingthis very well-known position he's hadopposing the auto bailout, and how that plays in here, Greg.

GREG PALAST: Well, two ways. And let's bring in Paul Ryan, as well. Number one, Mitt Romney said, "Let Detroit go bankrupt." And everyone thought this was a great, principled position. And yeah, he wanted it to go bankrupt so that he could buy the auto parts division for literally pennies, 67 cents a share, then flip it for 30, 40 times that amount. In addition, don't forget that this is TARP money. This is money that comes from the U.S. taxpayer.

And Paul "The Vulture" Singer became the number one donor also to a congressman named Paul Ryan. And it is, by the way, Singer, according to the Wall Street Journal, who forced Romney to accept Ryan as his running mate, in part because Paul Ryan, despite his speeches against TARP and against the bailouts, Paul Ryan voted for both the bank bailout and the auto bailout, very much enriching his number one donor. That'sso that's the politics of it, because also Romney has made Paul Singer a key economic adviser, and in addition, he's considered the most important donor to the Mitt Romney campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, if you can explain more who Paul Singer is and his significance in Republican politics?

GREG PALAST: Well, according to Fortune magazine and Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he is considered probably the most important of Romney's coterie of billionaires. He's the original $1 million donor to the 37-billionaire PAC called Restore Our Future. He's the guy who kind of signals all the other billionaires where to put their money. So, Singer is very, very important to Mitt Romney.

But most important is that Mitt RomneyPaul Singer, for five years, as we've been following him, has been using what are called "vulture tactics." He buys companies out ofhe buys companies out of bankruptcy, he buys nations out of bankruptcy, and then threatens them, kind offigures out a way to hold them ransom, as he did here with the auto parts, where he said, we're going to literally withhold all the parts for thefor every automaker in America unless you pay me my ransom. This is how he operates.

His tactics are now illegalactually, since our last broadcast, Amy, once it went out on BBC. Paul Singer's tactics have been outlawed in England, all throughout Europe, South America, but not in the U.S.A., except, I should noteand this is very important, which may be why Singer has backed Romney, which is that the Obama administration, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, have gone to federal court asking the federal courts to put Paul Singer out of business, basically, by saying his vulture tactics are a threat to the world economy and in violation and opposing United States foreign policy. So, basically, Obama and Clinton want to put Singer out of business. And RomneyRomney, we don't expect will, because Romney's number one foreign policy adviser, should he get elected president, would be expected to be Dan Senor to take over as secretary of state. Dan Senor's day job is working for Paul Singer.

AMY GOODMAN: And specifically, the auto bailout money that Paul Singer got?

GREG PALAST: Yes, hehe picked uphis hedge fund has so far picked up $1.29 billion. And you have to understand, that's about 42 times what he paid for the Delphi division of General Motors. So, basically, this one guy and his hedge fund have earned over a billion dollars, and some of that has now been pieced off to Ann and Mitt Romney. That's how they made the big cash.

AMY GOODMAN: Delphi Corporation, its role in outsourcing jobs to China, Greg Palast?

GREG PALAST: Well, basically, once the Romney groupthat's Singer, Romney and two other big hedge fundsthree other big hedge fundsgot a hold of Delphi, they were able tothey decided thatthey have proudly said, "We do not have a single North American United Auto Workers member anymore." They've closed every plant and moved them to China.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. The administration and General Motors cut a deal with Tom Gores, who is the owner of the Detroit Pistons. He's a billionaire. He's a Flinta Flint boy like Michael Moore. And he was going to buy Delphi and keep at least half the jobs in Michigan and in the United States. But because of thisbecause of really extraordinary financial maneuvering, the Romney group was able to overturn the deal that had already been made with General Motors and with Gores and the Treasury to keep Delphi jobs in the United States. Once the of vulture pack took over, they said, "We've got our money. We've got our $12 billion from the U.S. government. See you later, guys." And they shut down every plant except for one. [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of Mitt Romney in the presidential debate.

MITT ROMNEY: And one thing that thethe president said, which I want to make sure that we understand, he said that I said we should take Detroit bankrupt, andand that's right. My plan was to have the company go through bankruptcy like 7-Eleven did and Macy's andand Continental Airlines and come out stronger. Andand I know he keeps saying, "You wanted to take Detroit bankrupt." Well, the president took Detroit bankrupt. You took General Motors bankrupt. You took Chrysler bankrupt. So, when you say that I wanted to take the auto industry bankrupt, you actually did. Andand I think it's important to know that that was a process that was necessary to get those companies back on their feet, so they could start hiring more people. That was precisely what I recommended and ultimately what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mitt Romney on Tuesday at the presidential debate in Hofstra. Greg Palast?

GREG PALAST: Well, he left out something. He'sbasically, Romney's taking credit for the fact that the administration put in billions of dollars of funding to save the jobs at General Motors. They also put in billions of dollars of funding to save the jobs at General Motors' number one supplier, the DelphiDelphi, their old Delco division. The thing is, is that what he didn't say is that MittMitt Romney didn't say that he and his own co-investors, in a partnership, overturnedoverturned the deal that the U.S. government had made to save that auto parts division, and shut it down. They bought it out, shut it down, moved it to China. Now, Romney seemed to have left that one out of the mix. Once again, yes, the autoDelphi was put through bankruptcy, but unlike General Motors, because of the Romney group's actions, every single UAW job was lost.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Peter - thank you for your post above.

Greg Palast is that rare thing: a genuine investigative journalist.

His investigation above is a parable of C21st faux capitalism and C21st puppet politics.

The powerful sneer at us.

[Adele Edisen]

The New York Times
October 18, 2012

Snow Job on Jobs
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Mitt Romney talks a lot about jobs. But does he have a plan to create any?

You can defend President Obama's jobs record recovery from a severe financial crisis is always difficult, and especially so when the opposition party does its best to block every policy initiative you propose. And things have definitely improved over the past year. Still, unemployment remains high after all these years, and a candidate with a real plan to make things better could make a strong case for his election.

But Mr. Romney, it turns out, doesn't have a plan; he's just faking it. In saying that, I don't mean that I disagree with his economic philosophy; I do, but that's a separate point. I mean, instead, that Mr. Romney's campaign is telling lies: claiming that its numbers add up when they don't, claiming that independent studies support its position when those studies do no such thing.

Before I get there, however, let me take a minute to talk about Mr. Romney's claim that he knows how to fix the economy because he's been a successful businessman. That would be a dubious claim even if he were honestly representing his business career, because the skills needed to run a business and those needed to manage economic policy are very different. In any case, however, his portrait of his own experience is so misleading that it takes your breath away.

For Mr. Romney, who started as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity, insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.

I am not making this up. In Tuesday's debate, he declared, "I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business." In his speech at the Republican convention, he declared, "When I was 37, I helped start a small company."

Ahem. It's true that when Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37 million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn't every plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing? (Bold emphasis mine - AE)

But back to the Romney jobs plan. As many people have noted, the plan has five points but contains no specifics. Loosely speaking, however, it calls for a return to Bushonomics: tax cuts for the wealthy plus weaker environmental protection. And Mr. Romney says that the plan would create 12 million jobs over the next four years.

Where does that number come from? When pressed, the campaign cited three studies that it claimed supported its assertions. In fact, however, those studies did no such thing.

Just for the record, one study concluded that America might gain two million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. patents and other intellectual property; this would be nice, but Mr. Romney hasn't proposed anything that would bring about that outcome. Another study suggested that growth in the energy sector might add three million jobs in the next few years but these were predicted gains under current policy, that is, they would happen no matter who wins the election, not as a consequence of the Romney plan.

Finally, a third study examined the effects of the Romney tax plan and argued (implausibly, but that's another issue) that it would lead to a large increase in the number of Americans who want to work. But how does that help cure a situation in which there are already millions more Americans seeking work than there are jobs available? It's irrelevant to Mr. Romney's claims.

So when the campaign says that these three studies support its claims about jobs, it is, to use the technical term, lying just as it is when it says that six independent studies support its claims about taxes (they don't).

What do Mr. Romney's economic advisers actually believe? As best as I can tell, they're placing their faith in the confidence fairy, in the belief that their candidate's victory would inspire an employment boom without the need for any real change in policy. In fact, in his infamous Boca Raton "47 percent" remarks, Mr. Romney himself asserted that he would give a big boost to the economy simply by being elected, "without actually doing anything." And what about the overwhelming evidence that our weak economy isn't about confidence, it's about the hangover from a terrible financial crisis? Never mind.

To summarize, then, the true Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr. Romney's personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn't dare say that, for fear that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we're getting instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There's no jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people.


Adele

[Adele Edisen]

Fri, October 19, 2012 11:07:04 AM
Binders full of flim flam
From: Brasscheck TV <news@brasschecktv.com>

About the only thing we know about
Mitt Romney besides the suits he wears
and the fact he slicks back his hair is...

Gee, we don't know much, do we?

Here's a few things the news media missed.

Prepare to be shocked.

(Note: Critical appraisals of Romney are NOT
endorsements of the current Clown in Chief.)

Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/20723.html

- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.

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Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Greg Palast is that rare thing: a genuine investigative journalist.

Yes, he is!...and I love his wearing a 1940s Hollywood investigative journalist's hat, complete with the necktie, knot and shirt top opened and pulled down.

His investigation above is a parable of C21st faux capitalism and C21st puppet politics.

The powerful sneer at us.

Yes, it is and Yes they do......if we don't get rid of them; they are hellbent on very soon getting rid of us - once and for all time!