Romney

[Lauren Johnson]

Peter, What scenarios do you see happening in terms of ridding the world of the New Untermenschen?

[Peter Lemkin]

Peter, What scenarios do you see happening in terms of ridding the world of the New Untermenschen?

Well, there are some horror scenarios that there is evidence of they are planning for [such as massive depopulation; mass emplacement in camps; nuclear war, biological war selective as to victims and other such] - none of those are necessary. A continuation IMHO of exactly those policies NOW IN PLACE AND IN ACTION for another 10-20years would finish off the USA and most of the rest of the World. To wit: environmental degradation; Oligarchic-Bankster theft of all of our money; erosion of our rights; propaganda and disinfotainment rather than news; electronic spying on everything everyone does; the militarization of the Police and the Military helping them to arrest and imprison those who dare speak out or protest what is going on; the packing of the Judiciary and the wholesale purchase of the Executive and Congress; endless wars all on false premises; continued rise of neo-fascism; increased corruption at the top and desperation on the bottom; continued gulf between wealth and power of Oligarchy and Serfs; the diminution of any kind of social safety net; destruction of the education system and the dumbing down of most; the sell off of all public assets and items into 'privatization'; raping the Planet for resources for profit and the poisoning of it with the waste; global climate change and the ever quickening destruction of species; the poisoning and lessening of the health of food and water; the free movement of capital and the lack of free movement of labor; offshoring of jobs and factories; the continued break-up of community, family - sharing and caring - pitting everyone against everyone else; intelligence agencies creating patsies and arresting, after spying upon any/all resistors to the madness; union busting; demonstration busting; dissent busting; health care for the wealthy only; the increasing homelessness, unemployment and poverty - not to mention hunger; increase in children born into and living in poverty; the increasing prison population and new laws to create new crimes without victims; the near complete police-state; redefining history and inventing current events with lies; false-flag ops end-on-end to keep the population frightened....shall I go on?! [Could for another 50 lines without any trouble......] They only need to keep on this track and America will collapse, followed by Europe and the rest of the World - chaos; false-flag ops; 1984-type 24-7 observation of all one does/says/thinks; wars and starvation - environmental ruin - poverty, ill health, mega-death world wide. Neo-feudalism. Stop it or it stops us. I think my 10-20 years is too generous....the USA could go under in 5-10, IMO... quicker under the Republicans; but surely also under the Democrats. We are in DEEP trouble and near the abyss. May I suggest the video/book below by Hedges as an apt analysis of the problem [though there have been many others of late, as well]

I think the most dangerous liberal viewpoint is along the lines of 'humans have been in trouble before and will find a way past these troubles, as they have in the past.' This is unparalleled and backed-up by unparalleled technology to spy, propagandize, control, and destroy. To me this is really the endgame and while it can go either way still, the black hats are way in the lead and nearly in total control....however, there are a hell of lot more of US than of THEM! What is happening is revolting and the only thing we can do is educate, cooperate, embrace a completely different paradigm for living, and REVOLT!

[Adele Edisen]

Employees of Romney Family's Secret Bank Tied to Fraud, Money Laundering, Drug Cartels, and the CIA

http://www.globalresearch.ca/employees-o...ia/5309091

What should we have expected to see here?

From article:

As previously reported in by the Columbus Free Press, the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt's "6th son" and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney's campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Employees of Romney Family's Secret Bank Tied to Fraud, Money Laundering, Drug Cartels, and the CIA

http://www.globalresearch.ca/employees-o...ia/5309091

What should we have expected to see here?

From article:

As previously reported in by the Columbus Free Press, the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt's "6th son" and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney's campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Adele

Yeah, a true American crime family, like the Bush family and SO many others in the 0.01%.......the only surprise is this is kept under wraps from the public [along with everything else of substance] by the MSM, who these crime families generally own and get obligance from. Get ready for the Ohio vote to be fraudulent and stolen in many ways...including Tagg's connections to the machines and the 'count' [backroom varient via computer - see diagram Lauren put up on another thread]. Rove will have his hand in all this, as will others. Along with 'challenges' de-registrations and other illegal actions taking America back to poll-tax days, and erasing all the legislation to attempt to make voting more fair and free, those who pull the strings of the one party state will have their say.....the American People will only think they have [often based on lack of information and certainly based on lack of access to third an fourth, fifth party candidates.....]
Some democracy!....NOT!

[Jan Klimkowski]

Employees of Romney Family's Secret Bank Tied to Fraud, Money Laundering, Drug Cartels, and the CIA

http://www.globalresearch.ca/employees-o...ia/5309091

What should we have expected to see here?

From article:

As previously reported in by the Columbus Free Press, the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt's "6th son" and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney's campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Adele

Yeah, a true American crime family, like the Bush family and SO many others in the 0.01%.......the only surprise is this is kept under wraps from the public [along with everything else of substance] by the MSM, who these crime families generally own and get obligance from. Get ready for the Ohio vote to be fraudulent and stolen in many ways...including Tagg's connections to the machines and the 'count' [backroom varient via computer - see diagram Lauren put up on another thread]. Rove will have his hand in all this, as will others. Along with 'challenges' de-registrations and other illegal actions taking America back to poll-tax days, and erasing all the legislation to attempt to make voting more fair and free, those who pull the strings of the one party state will have their say.....the American People will only think they have [often based on lack of information and certainly based on lack of access to third an fourth, fifth party candidates.....]
Some democracy!....NOT!

A true American crime family indeed.

It's a chapter inspired by Once Upon a Time in America, or The Godfather Part II.

However, like the Bush crime family and the Murdoch crime family, the Romenys are Facilitators-cum-Mechanics.

Not true Sponsors

[Peter Lemkin]

How Wall Street Won the Election Long Before The First Vote Was Cast
By Nomi Prins
Global Research, October 27, 2012

Before the campaign contributors lavished billions of dollars on their favorite candidate; and long after they toast their winner or drink to forget their loser, Wall Street was already primed to continue its reign over the economy.

For, after three debates (well, four), when it comes to banking, finance, and the ongoing subsidization of Wall Street, both presidential candidates and their parties' attitudes toward the banking sector is similar i.e. it must be preserved as is at all costs, rhetoric to the contrary, aside.

Obama hasn't brought sweeping reform' upon the Establishment Banks, nor does Romney need to exude deregulatory babble, because nothing structurally substantive has been done to harness the biggest banks of the financial sector, enabled, as they are, by entities from the SEC to the Fed to the Treasury Department to the White House.

In addition, though much is made of each candidates' tax plans, and the related math that doesn't add up (for both presidential candidates), the bottom line is, Obama hasn't explained exactly WHY there's $5 trillion more in debt during his presidency, nor has Romney explained HOW to get a $5 trillion savings.

For the record, both missed, or don't get, that nearly 32% of that Treasury debt is reserved (in excess) at the Fed, floating the banking system that supposedly doesn't need help. The worst economic period since the Great Depression' barely produced a short-fall of an approximate average of $200 billion in personal and corporate tax revenues per year, according to federal data [3].)

Consider that the amount of tax revenue since 2008, has dropped for individual income contributions from $1.15 trillion in 2008 to $915 billion in 2009, to $899 billion in 2010, then risen to $1.1 trillion in 2011. Corporate tax contributions have dropped (by more of course) from $304 billion in 2008 to $138 billion in 2009 to $191 billion in 2010, to $181 billion in 2011. Thus, at most, we can consider to have lost $420 billion in individual revenue and $402 billion in corporate revenue, or $822 billion from 2009 on. The Fed has, in addition, held on average of $1.6 trillion Treasuries in excess reserves. That, plus $822 billion equals $2.42 trillion, add on the other $900 billion of Fed held mortgage securities, and you get $3.32 trillion, NOT $5 trillion, and most to float banks.

The most consistent political platform is that big finance trumps main street economics, and the needs of the banking sector trump those of the population. We have a national policy condoning zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) as somehow job-creative. (Fed Funds rates dropped to 0% by the end of 2008 [4], where they have remained since.)

We are left with a regulatory policy of pretend. Rather than re-instating Glass-Steagall to divide commercial from investment banking and insurance activity, thereby removing the platform of government (or public) supported speculation and expansion, props leaders that pretend linguistic tweaks are a match for financial might. We have no leader that will take on Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the country's largest bank, JPM Chase, who can devote 15% of the capital of JPM Chase, which remains backstopped by customer deposit insurance, to bet on the direction of potential corporate defaults, and slide by two Congressional investigations like walks in the park.

Pillars of Collusion

A few months ago, Paul Craig Roberts and I co-wrote an article about the LIBOR [5] scandal; the crux of which, was lost on most of the media. That is; the banks, the Fed, and the Treasury Department knew banks were manipulating rates lower to artificially support the prices of hemorrhaging assets and debt securities. But no one in Washington complained, because they were in on it; because it made the over-arching problem of debt-manufacturing and bloating the Fed's balance sheet to subsidize a banking industry at the expense of national economic health, evaporate in the ether of delusion.

In the same vein, the Fed announced QE3, the unlimited version the Fed would buy $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities from banks. Why if the recession is supposedly over and the housing market has supposedly bottomed out would this be necessary?

Simple. If the Fed is buying securities, it's because the banks can't sell them anywhere else. And because banks still need to get rid of these mortgage assets, they won't lend again or refinance loans at faster rates, thereby sharing their advantage for cheaper money, as anyone trying to even refinance a mortgage has discovered. Thus, Banks simply aren't healthy', not withstanding their $1.53 trillion [6] of excess reserves (earning interest), and nearly $900 billion in mortgage backed securities parked at the Fed. The open-ended QE program is merely perpetuating the illusion that as long as bank assets get marked higher (through artificial buyers, zero percent interest rates, or not having to mark them to market), everything is fine.

Meanwhile, Washington coddles and subsidizes the biggest banks not to encourage lending, not to encourage saving, and not to better the country, but to contain harsh truths about how badly banks played, and are still playing, the nation.

The SEC's Role

According to the SEC's own report card [7] on "Enforcement Actions: Addressing Misconduct that led to or arose from the Financial Crisis": the SEC has levied charges against 112 entities and individuals, of which 55 were CEOs, CFOs, and other Senior Corporate Officers.

In terms of fines; the SEC ordered or agreed to' $1.4 billion of penalties, $460 million of disgorgement and prejudgment interest, and $355 million of "Additional Monetary Relief Obtained for Harmed Investors. That's a grand total of $2.2 billion of fines. (The Department of Justice dismissed additional charges or punitive moves.)

Goldman, Sachs received the largest fine, of $550 million, taking no responsibility (in SEC-speak, "neither confirming nor denying' any wrongdoing) for packaging CDOs on behalf of one client, which supported their prevailing trading position, and pushing them on investors without disclosing that information, which would have materially changed pricing and attractiveness. (The DOJ found nothing else to charge Goldman with, apparently not considering misleading investors, fraud.)

Obama-appointed SEC head, Mary Shapiro, originally settled with Bank of America for a friendly $34 million, until Judge Rakoff quintupled the fine to $150 million, for misleading shareholders during its Fed-approved, Treasury department pushed, acquisition of Merrill Lynch, regarding bonus compensation. (Merrill's $3.6 billion of bonuses were paid before the year-end of 2008, while TARP and other subsidies were utilized). Still embroiled in ongoing lawsuits related to its Countrywide acquisition, Bank of America agreed to an additional $601.5 million in one non-SEC settlement, and $2.43 billion in another relating to those Merrill bonuses. Likewise, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $590 million for its fall-2008 acquisition of Wachovia's foul loans and securities. These are small prices to pay to grow your asset and customer base.

Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to the SEC to settle charges of misleading investors and betting against them, in the sale of one (one!) $1 billion CDO. Judge Rakoff rejected the settlement, but Citigroup is appealing. So is its friend, the SEC. Outside of that, Citigroup agreed to an additional $590 million to settle a shareholder CDO lawsuit, denying wrongdoing.

JPM Chase agreed to a $153.5 million SEC fine relating to one (one!) CDO. Outside of Washington, it agreed to a $100 million settlement for hiking credit card fees, and a $150 million settlement for a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists retirement fund and other investors, over losses from its purchase of JPM's Sigma Finance Hedge Fund, when it used to be rated AAA.'

There you have it. No one did anything wrong. The total of $2.2 billion in SEC fines, and about $4.4 billion in outside lawsuits is paltry. Consider that for the same period (since 2007), total Wall Street bonuses topped $679 billion [8], or nearly 309 times as much as the SEC fines, and 154 times as much as all the settlements.

The SEC & Dodd Frank Dance

The SEC embarked upon 90 actions, divided into 15 categories, related to the Dodd-Frank Act that amount to proposing or adopting rules with loopholes galore, and creating reports that summarize things we know. Some of the obvious categories, like asset backed related products or derivatives, don't even include CDOs, which got the lion's share of SEC fines and DOJ indifference.

Rather than tightening regulations on the most egregious financial product culprits; insurance swaps, such as the credit default swaps imbedded in CDOs, the SEC loosened them. It did so by approving an order making many of the Exchange Act requirements not applicable to security-based swaps [9]. In one new post-Dodd-Frank order, it stated, a "product will not be considered a swap or security-based swap if ,,, it falls within the category of…insurance, including against default on individual residential mortgages." Thus, credit default swaps, considered insurance since their inception, warrant no special attention in the grand land of sweeping reform.

The credit ratings category includes 20 items proposed, requested, or adopted. Under things accomplished, the SEC gave a report to Congress that basically says that the majority of rating agency business is paid for by issuers (which we knew), and proclaims (I kid you not) that a security is rated "investment grade" if it is rated "investment grade" by at least one rating agency. Further inspection of SEC self-labeled accomplishments provides no more confidence, that anything has, or will, change for the safer.

The White House & Congress

Yet, the Obama White House wants us to believe that Dodd-Frank was sweeping reform.' Romney and the Republicans are up and arms over it, simply because it exists and sounds like regulation, and Democrats defensively portray its effectiveness.

Ignore them both and ask yourself the relevant questions. Are the big banks bigger? Yes. Can they still make markets and keep crappy securities on their books, as long as they want, while formulating them into more complicated securities, buoyed by QE measures and ZIRP? Yes. Do they have to evaluate their positions in real world terms so we know what's really going on? No.

Then, there's the Volcker Rule which equates spinning off private equity desks or moving them into asset management arms, with regulatory progress. If it could be fashioned to prohibit all speculative trading or connected securities creation on the backbone of FDIC-insured deposits, it might work, but then you'd have Glass-Steagall, which is the only form of regulatoin that will truly protect us from banking-spawned crisis.

Meanwhile, banks can still make markets and trade in everything they were doing before as long as they say it's on behalf of a client. This was the entire problem during the pre-crisis period. The implosion of piles of toxic assets based on shaky loans or other assets didn't result from private equity trading or even from isolating trading of any bank's own books (except in cases like that of Bear Stearns' hedge funds), but from federally subsidized, highly risky, ridiculously leveraged, assets engineered under the guise of bespoke' customer requests or market making related demand.'

When the Banking Act was passed in 1933, even Republican millionaire bankers, like the head of Chase, Winthrop Aldrich, understood that reducing systemic risk might even help them in the long run, and publicly supported it. Today, Jamie Dimon shuns all forms of separation or regulation, and neither political party dares interfere.

But things worked out for Dimon. JPM Chase's board (of which he is Chairman) approved his $23 million 2011 compensation package (the top bank CEO package), despite disclosure of a $2 billion (now about $6 billion) loss in the infamous Whale Trade. He banked $20.8 million in 2010, the highest paid bank CEO [10] that year, too. In 2009, Dimon made $1.32 million, publicly, but really bagged $16 million worth of stock and options. He made $19.7 million in total compensation for 2008, and $34 million for 2007. Still a New York Fed, Class A director, he's proven himself to be untouchable.

Yet, the kinds of deals that were so problematic are creeping back. According to Asset Backed Alert, JPM Chase was the top asset-baked security (ABS) issuer for the first half of 2012, lead managing $66 billion of US ABS deals.

In addition, according to Asset Back Alert, US public ABS deal volume rose 92.8% for the second half of 2012 vs. 2011, while issuance of US prime MBS (high quality deals) fell 50.6%. Overall CDO issuance rose 50.2% [11]. (Citigroup is the lead issuer (up 552%.))

ZIRP's hidden losses

According to a comprehensive analysis of data compiled from regulatory documents by Bill Moreland and his team at my new favorite website, http://www.bankregdata.com [12], some really scary numbers pop out. Here's the kicker: ZIRP costs citizens and disproportionately helps the biggest banks, by about $120 billion a year.

Between 2005 and 2007, US commercial banks held approximately $6.97 trillion of interest bearing customer deposits. During the past two quarters, they held an average of $7.31 trillion. During that first period, when fed funds rates averaged 4.5%, banks paid their customers an average of $39.6 billion of interest per quarter. More recently, with ZIRP, they paid an average of $8.9 billion in interest per quarter, or nearly 77% LESS. In dollar terms that's about $30.7 billion less per quarter, or $123 billion less per year.

Since ZIRP kicked into gear in 2008, banks have saved nearly $486 billion in interest payments. Average salary and compensation increased by approximately 23%. Dividend payments declined by 14.05%.

The biggest banks are the biggest takers. Consider JPM Chase's cut. Although its deposits disproportionately increased by 46% from 2007 (pre ZIRP and helped by the acquisition of Washington Mutual) to 2012, its interest expenses declined by nearly 89%. From 2004 to 2007, Chase paid out $34.4 billion in interest to its deposit customers. From 2008 to mid-2012, it paid out $3.4 billion. JPM Chase's ratio of interest paid to deposits of .27% is the lowest of the big four banks, that on average pay less than smaller banks anyway.

The percentage of JPM Chase's assets comprised of loans and leases is lower at 36.04% compared to its peers' percentage of 52.4%. Its trading portion of assets is higher, as 14.78% vs. 6.88% for its peers, and 4.23% for all banks.

Looking Ahead

To recap: savers, borrowers, and the economy are still losing money due to the preservation of the illusion of bank health. More critically, the big banks grew through acquisitions and the ongoing closures of smaller local banks that provided better banking terms to citizens. The big banks have more assets and deposits, on which they are over-valuing prices, and paying less interest than before, due to a combination of Fed and Treasury blessed mergers in late 2008, QE and ZIRP. Yet, we're supposed to believe this situation will somehow manifest a more solid and productive economy.

Meanwhile, past faulty securities and loans will fester until their transfer to the Fed is complete or they mature, while new ones take their place. This will inevitably lead to more of a clampdown on loans for productive purposes and further economic degradation and instability. Financial policy trumps economic policy. Banks trump citizens, and absent severe reconstruction of the banking system, the cycle will absolutely, unequivocally continue.

Notes

[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/nomi-prins
[3] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
[4] http://www.neworkfed.org/markets/statist...drate.html
[5] http://www.nomiprins.com/thoughts/2012/7...prins.html
[6] http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h...ent/h3.htm
[7] http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/enf-actions-fc.shtml
[8] http://osc.state.ny.us/press/releases/fe...t-2011.pdf
[9] http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2011/2011-141.htm
[10] http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/news...index.html
[11] http://www.abalert.com/ranking.php?rid=2563
[12] http://www.bankregdata.com/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/romney-0
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/obama-0
[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wall-street
[16] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

[Peter Lemkin]

Why I'm Voting Green
By Chris Hedges (about the author) Permalink (Page 1 of 1 pages)
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/29/2012 at 09:44:19

The November election is not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It is not a battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It is a battle between the corporate state and us. And if we do not immediately engage in this battle we are finished, as climate scientists have made clear. I will defy corporate power in small and large ways. I will invest my energy now solely in acts of resistance, in civil disobedience and in defiance.

Those who rebel are our only hope. And for this reason I will vote next month for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, although I could as easily vote for Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. I will step outside the system. Voting for the "lesser evil" -- or failing to vote at all -- is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.

All the major correctives to American democracy have come through movements and third parties that have operated outside the mainstream. Few achieved formal positions of power. These movements built enough momentum and popular support, always in the face of fierce opposition, to force the power elite to respond to their concerns. Such developments, along with the courage to defy the political charade in the voting booth, offer the only hope of saving us from Wall Street predators, the assault on the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the rise of the security and surveillance state and the dramatic erosion of our civil liberties.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any," Alice Walker writes.

It was the Liberty Party that first fought slavery. It was the Prohibition and Socialist parties, along with the Suffragists, that began the fight for the vote for women and made possible the 19th Amendment. It was the Socialist Party, along with radical labor unions, that first battled against child labor and made possible the 40-hour workweek. It was the organizing of the Populist Party that gave us the Immigration Act of 1924 along with a "progressive" tax system. And it was the Socialists who battled for unemployment benefits, leading the way to the Social Security Act of 1935. No one in the ruling elite, including Franklin Roosevelt, would have passed this legislation without pressure from the outside.

"It is the combination of a social movement on the ground with an independent political party that has always made history together, whether during abolition, women's suffrage or the labor movement," Stein said when I reached her by phone as she campaigned in Chicago...

"We need courage in our politics that matches the courage of the social movements -- of Occupy, eviction blockades, Keystone pipeline civil disobedience, student strikes, the Chicago teachers union and more. If public opinion really mattered in this race, we [her presidential ticket] would win. We have majority support in poll after poll on nearly all of the key issues, from downsizing the military budget and bringing the troops home, to taxing the rich, to stopping the Wall Street bailouts, to breaking up the banks, to ending the offshoring of jobs, to supporting workers' rights, to increasing the minimum wage, to health care as a human right, through Medicare for all. These are the solutions a majority of Americans are clamoring for."

The corporate state has successfully waged a campaign of fear to disempower voters and citizens. By intimidating voters through a barrage of propaganda with the message that Americans have to vote for the lesser evil and that making a defiant stand for justice and democracy is counterproductive, it cements into place the agenda of corporate domination we seek to thwart. This fear campaign, skillfully disseminated by the $2.5 billion spent on political propaganda, has silenced real political opposition. It has turned those few politicians and leaders who have the courage to resist, such as Stein and Ralph Nader, into pariahs, denied a voice in the debates and the national discourse. Capitulation, silence and fear, however, are not a strategy. They will guarantee everything we seek to avoid.

"The Obama administration has embraced the policies of George W. Bush, and then gone much further," Stein said...

"Wall Street bailouts went ballistic under Obama -- $700 billion under Bush, but $4.5 trillion under Obama, plus another $16 trillion in zero-interest loans for Wall Street. Obama continues offshoring our jobs. Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA, which was carried out under George W. Bush. It was vastly expanded under Obama to labor abusers in Colombia, and to Panama and South Korea. The Transpacific Partnership, being negotiated behind closed doors by the Obama White House, is NAFTA on steroids. It continues to send our jobs overseas. It undermines wages at home. It overrides American sovereignty by establishing an international corporate board that can overrule American legislation and regulations that protect workers as well as our air, our water, our climate and our food supply."

Obama, who has claimed the power of assassinating U.S. citizens without charge or trial, increased the drone war and has vastly expanded the wars in the Middle East. He is waging proxy wars in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. His assault on civil liberties -- from his use of the Espionage Act to silence whistle-blowers to Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act to the FISA Amendment Act -- is worse than Bush's. His attack on immigrant rights has also outpaced that of Bush. Obama has deported more undocumented workers in four years than his Republican predecessor did in eight years. There is negligible difference between Obama and Romney on the issue of student debt, which has turned a generation of college students into indentured servants. But the most important convergence between the Republicans and the Democrats is their utter failure to address the perilous assault by the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. It was Obama who undercut the international climate accord reached last year at Durban, South Africa, saying the world could wait until 2020 for an agreement.

"Obama is promoting oil drilling in the Arctic, where the ice cap has already collapsed to one-quarter of its size from a couple decades ago, and he's opened up our national parks for drilling," Stein said.

"He has given the green light to fracking. He has permitted the exhaust from shale oil [extraction] to go into the atmosphere. He is building the southern pass of the Keystone pipeline. He brags that he has built more miles of pipeline than any other president.

"There is a protracted drought in 60 percent of the continental U.S. There are record forest fires and rising food prices. We have just now seen the 12 hottest months on record. Storms are growing in destructiveness. All this is happening with less than 1-degree Celsius temperature rise. Yet we are now on track for a 6-degree Celsius warming in this century alone. This is not survivable. The most pessimistic science on climate change has underpredicted the rate at which climate change is advancing."

The flimsy excuses used by liberals and progressives to support Obama, including the argument that we can't let Romney appoint the next Supreme Court justices, ignore the imperative of building a movement as fast and as radical as possible as a counterweight to corporate power. The Supreme Court, no matter what its composition, will not save us from financial implosion and climate collapse. And Obama, whatever his proclivity on social issues, has provided ample evidence that he will not alter his servitude to the corporate state. For example, he has refused to provide assurance that he will not make cuts in basic social infrastructures. He has proposed raising the eligibility age for Medicare, a move that would leave millions without adequate health care in retirement. He has said he will reduce the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security, thrusting vast numbers of seniors into poverty. Progressives' call to vote for independents in "safe" states where it is certain the Democrats will win will do nothing to mitigate fossil fuel's ravaging of the ecosystem, regulate and prosecute Wall Street or return to us our civil liberties.

"There is no state out there where either Obama or Romney offers a way out of here alive," Stein said. "It's up to us to create truly safe states, a safe nation, and a safe planet. Neither Obama nor Romney has a single exit strategy from the deadly crises we face."

[Peter Lemkin]

Obama's FBI and CIA going gay' warns pro-family activist

by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:26 EST

October 2, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency have embraced the homosexual movement, posing a new threat to the country's sexual morals and to pro-family activists, according to Brian Camenker of the Massachusetts pro-life and pro-family organization MassResistance.

"The US military and State Department aren't the only branches of the US government to go gay," notes Camenker. "Since the Obama Administration took control, the FBI and CIA, the two main federal law enforcement and surveillance organizations, have fully embraced the homosexual and transgender movements, and appear to be poised to crack down on pro-family groups and citizens who are critical."

The agencies' new "orientation" is evident on their own websites, one of which boasts of the FBI's "Sexual Orientation Program," a homosexual outreach that enables gays to "come out" to their coworkers and even hosts "gay pride" events at headquarters and field offices. The CIA has created it's own Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Employees and Allies (ANGLE) whose slogan is "Inclusion for All, Celebrating with Pride."

The two agencies are hosting booths at homosexual events, and a CIA representative reportedly boasted to visitors on one such occasion that their headquarters "will soon have two unisex restrooms."

Click "like" if you want to defend true marriage.

The CIA's ANGLE recently "co-hosted a panel discussion of CIA senior leaders as part of the 2012 June Pride Month celebration," according to the agency's website. "The panel highlighted the role alliesstraight family members, friends, colleagues, and managers who believe in and actively promote equalityplay in creating an inclusive workforce for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) employees at the CIA."

Camenker notes that homosexual publications are running headlines stating that the "FBI encourages LGBTs to report hate crimes" and that Attorney General Eric Holder "has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote the LGBT agenda," including giving a Department of Justice award to a "transgender" attorney who works for the agency while in drag. He also notes that the FBI has created an intimate partnership with the anti-family Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a leftist, anti-family group which labels organizations that defend family values and reject the homosexual agenda as "hate groups."

Camenker regards Barack Obama as "more aggressive at pushing the radical homosexual and transgender agendas than anyone could possibly have imagined."

"The fact that the mainstream media (and most of the conservative media) is almost completely silent about this gives him even more cover to continue. In a second term, it would unquestionably get even worse," he adds.

However, Camenker also notes that Republican candidate Mitt Romney's own statements on the homosexual agenda suggest that pro-family groups would find little relief in his administration.

"When Romney announced to a national audience that he would support gay rights' and in effect be the most pro-homosexual Republican president ever, that didn't give us much confidence," writes Camenker.

[Magda Hassan]

AlterNet / By Bruce Wilson

The basis for Ryan's big plan was hatched under the radical right-wing Chilean torture regime of 1973 military coup leader Augusto Pinochet.Where Did Paul Ryan Find Inspiration for 'Reforming' Social Security? A Brutal Military Dictatorship, Naturally


October 30, 2012 |

While the Republican Party and its wealthy plutocrat backers have been accused of waging an elitist virtual war against the American majority, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have financial and ideological ties to rich Latin American elites who have waged real wars against average citizens in their countries.
The anti-democratic ethos of today's GOP, displayed in Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's apparent contempt for 47% of U.S. citizens, is reflected in the origins of Mitt Romney's private equity firm Bain Capital, which was founded with money from Central American financiers linked to government-backed death squads in El Salvador. Paul Ryan's budgetary ideas have a similarly dark origin, in the paradigmatic case of what author Naomi Klein has dubbed "The Shock Doctrine".
In August 2012, Republican political consultant Roger Stone made the accusation that the billionaire libertarian Koch Brothers had bought Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as a running mate, by offering to kick in $100 million more for "independent expenditures" in the 2012 presidential election.
While the charge may never be substantiated, Paul Ryan is one of the few elected officials allowed into the inner sanctum of the Koch brothers and their fellow libertarian big money donor circle.
It is also the case that Paul Ryan's Social Security privatization ideas closely track Koch Brother schemes promoted from the Koch-funded libertarian Cato Institute since 1980, over three decades ago - before Ryan had even hit puberty. Cato's website currently features the ringing endorsement of Paul Ryan:

"Ryan is an articulate defender of free enterprise, and he consistently argues not just for the practical advantages of smaller government but also about the moral imperative to cut... if the next administration is Republican, and if it decides it wants to push major reforms, Paul Ryan is uniquely qualified to lead the charge."

In 2005 Congressman Paul Ryan led a failed Republican legislative push for a Social Security privatization plan that also later popped up in Ryan's 2010 "Roadmap For America's Future". This centerpiece of Ryan's budgetary vision traces back to a vicious war on the poor and middle class that was waged over three decades ago by a South American police state.
The conceptual basis of Ryan's Social Security privatization approach was hatched as the Piñera plan that was implemented under the radical right-wing Chilean torture regime of 1973 military coup leader Augusto Pinochet.
The Pinochet regime honed many of the techniques later used at the Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, was known to dispose of its unwanted citizens by throwing them out helicopters into the sea, and ran a transnational terrorism syndicate that murdered thousands and has been accused of a 1976 car bombing assassination in Washington D.C.
While the Piñera plan sought to eliminate wealth redistribution under the old pre-Pinochet Chilean pension system - by jump-starting a new pension system under which Chileans began investing in private sector pension accounts - by 2006, by broad Chilean public consensus, the original Piñera Plan was considered to be a failure and in 2008 it was substantially modified by new legislation.
A report on the Chilean pension reform from the U.S. Social Security Administration explained, "The cornerstone of the new law sets up a basic universal pension as a supplement to the individual accounts system." As the the New York Times described in an April 2008 story, Chile's new law was a dramatic move away from radical libertarian privatization:

"Chile is undertaking its biggest overhaul ever of its pioneering private pension system, adding sweeping public payouts for the low-income elderly.The new $2 billion-a-year program will expand public pensions to groups left out by private pensions - the poor and self-employed, homewives, street vendors and farmers who saved little for retirement - granting about a quarter of the nation's work force public pensions by 2012."

Even as political pressure to overhaul the Chilean pension system was building, in 2005 under the George W. Bush Administration Paul Ryan spearheaded an attempt to pass legislation that would have imposed a modified version of the Piñera Plan on Americans.
A Long-Expected Birthday Party
On February 2, 2005, at a Washington, D.C. celebration of the 100th anniversary of libertarian guru Ayn Rand's birthday,held by the Rand-devoted Atlas Society, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan declared his fealty to the guiding principles of Rand, founder of a cultic school of thought known as Objectivism, which holds up selfishness as the highest moral virtue.
Ryan was introduced by Atlas Society Director of Advocacy Ed Hudgins, who told the audience of Ayn Rand admirers,

"He is best known for his efforts in the fight to reform Social Security by allowing the expanded use of individual retirement accounts. Now, I don't know whether you [Ryan] use the 'privatization' word. We here have no problem with that [Ryan overheard laughing] but sometimes you have to do a little bit of a soft sell up there, because many members of Congress are not quite as as far-thinking as Congressman Ryan."

In his speech to the Atlas Society Ryan confessed to the assembled true believers, "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." Then he addressed his 2005 attempt to pass legislation privatizing Social Security.
In Ayn Rand's view, the paramount good is individualism, the paramount evilcollectivism. Ryan told his audience,

"The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism... when you look at the fight that we're in here in Capital Hill, it's a tough fight... there is no more fight that is more obvious between the differences of these two conflicts than Social Security. Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it's a welfare transfer system."

Moments later, as he declared, "what's important is if we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing social security", Ryan could be heard laughing while the Atlas Society's Ed Hudgins, also laughing, interjected, "personalizing".
After the mirthful outburst, Ryan continued, "personalizing social security," (to laughter and applause, this time from the audience,) "think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist."
"Personalizing", it was clear, was a thinly veiled code word for "privatizing" and later,
during a question-and-answer period, the specific model for that project became clear: it was privatization under the vicious, bloody Latin American military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
As the Atlas Society's Ed Hudgins told the audience, with Paul Ryan enthusiastically interjecting,

"By the way, I just want to add real quickly, and I know the Congressman has I'm sure said this. [General Augusto Pinochet's Secretary of Labor and Social Security] José Piñera, who helped privatize Social Security in Chile, who also was by the way an Ayn Rand fan--José points out the moral revolution that occurs with privatization, that is, people in Chile, you know, who thought of themselves as Marxist suddenly feel that they are owners of property [Ryan "Yeah"] and, you know, they literally get up and they start reading the Chilean equivalent of the Wall Street Journal [Ryan interjects, "That's right"]."

After his talk, during a question-and-answer period, Ryan coached the libertarian audience on how they could best lobby Congress in favor of the 2005 legislative effort, which failed after meeting stiff Democratic Party opposition, to begin privatizing social security along the lines of José Piñera's Chilean Model.
The Chilean Model
There was more to the "moral revolution", that Ed Hudgins and Paul Ryan agreed had followed in the wake of pension privatization in Chile, than petite bourgeoisie pension fund investors reading their Chilean "Wall Street Journals".
In 1970, Chilean physicist and politician Salvador Allende, a professed marxist, won Chile's presidency in a close three-way race. Recently declassified documents reveal a massive campaign of economic sabotage was soon initiated at the command of U.S. president Richard Nixon, who ordered his operatives to "make the [Chilean] economy scream". By 1973, amidst economic disruption and growing public protest, the Chilean military took action.
On September 11, 1973, in an U.S.-encouraged military coup, Chilean Air Force warplanes began bombing and strafing the National Palace, Allende's governmental headquarters; amidst a firefight, as coup forces moved in, president Allende committed suicide to avoid capture.
A military junta, led by General Augusto Pinochet - who considered himself to be guided by the hand of God, commenced; over the course of his regime thousands of Chileans suspected of socialist or leftist leanings were rounded up and executed.
And, in over 1,000 secret detention facilities across the country, tens of thousands of men, women, and children (by some scholarly estimates between 1.5 and 3 percent of Chile's population) were subjected by authorities to brutal beatings, sexual abuses (sometimes involving animals), electroshock, psychological torture, and even medical torture, in a pattern that foreshadowed abuses at the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq. It was especially hard on women; years later, a governmental commission would report that female prisoners were routinely, repeatedly, raped*.
Meanwhile, American-trained economists, dominated by the privatization-obsessed "Chicago School" moved in. In Chile after the 1973 coup, the nation would become a forced libertarian experiment, imposed at gunpoint, in neo-liberal, free-market privatization. Leading the charge was José Piñera, now Co-chairman of the Project on Social Security Choice at the Libertarian Cato Institute.
The "Chilean model" has been showcased so aggressively by libertarian economists and think tanks such as the Cato Institute, as a shining example of privatization, that it's difficult to find analysis even mildly critical of the torture regime-backed experiment amidst the copious pro-privatization propaganda that populates Internet searches on the subject.
And José Piñera - who has built an international career advising governments, such asSouth Korea, on how to privatize their pension systems - vigorously denies the documented extent of the the shocking human rights abuses that went on in Chile while he treated the nation as a personal privatization laboratory.
In an article posted since 2005 on his website, Piñera claimed that General Pinochet's bloody coup - which is nowacknowledged to have begun with a mass execution of Chileans held at Santiago's national sports stadium - was necessary because President Allende had violated the Chilean constitution, and because, alleges Piñera, socialist and communist factions backing Allende were planning a campaign of political violence.
In a 2005 Mother Jones story, writer Barbara T. Dreyfuss adds, 'In another piece, he [Piñera] claims that "there was not a systematic policy of eliminating political opponents. Most of the casualties were people using violence to oppose the new government." '
But Piñera's desperate public relations bid was overwhelmed by horrific facts that emerged as Chile sought to wrestle with its dark, recent past In 2003, Chilean President Patricio Aylwin established Chile's National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, to investigate and document the Pinochet regime's human rights abuses and, in November 2004, the Valech Commission released its first 1200-page report, which stated that during the Pinochet regime,

"[torture was] used as a tool for political control through suffering. Irrespective of any possible direct or indirect participation in acts that could be construed as illegal, the State resorted to torture during the entire period of the military regime. Torture sought to instill fear, to force people to submit, to obtain information, to destroy an individual's capacity for moral, physical, psychological, and political resistance and opposition to the military regime. In order to "soften people up"--according to the torturers' slang--they used different forms of torture.... The victims were humiliated, threatened, and beaten; exposed to extreme cold, to heat and the sun until they became dehydrated; to thirst, hunger, sleep deprivation; they were submerged in water mixed with sewage to the point of asphyxiation; electric shocks were applied to the most sensitive parts of their bodies; they were sexually humiliated, if not raped by men and animals, or forced to witness the rape and torture of their loved ones."

Also in 2004, the government of Chile officially announced a policy of paying reparations to victims of the Pinochet regime and a Chilean judge indicted Pinochet for crimes that included murder and kidnapping.
A February 7, 2007 Harvard Crimson story, Torture Under Pinochet, covered more of the horrific details:

The [Chilean governmental] Report of the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture was commissioned in 2003 to create the most comprehensive list possible of those who were imprisoned and tortured for political reasons during the military dictatorship from September 1973 to March 1990......The Commission took testimony from 35,868 individuals who were tortured or imprisoned improperly. Of those, 27,255 were verified and included. An unknown number of victims did not come forward to give testimony. Scholars estimate that the real number is between 150,000 and 300,000 victims.
94 per cent of the verified testimonies include incidents of torture. The short list of methods includes repeated kicking or hitting, intentional physical scarring, forcing victims to maintain certain positions, electric shocks to sensitive areas, threats, mock execution, humiliation, forced nudity, sexual assault, witnessing the torture or execution of others, forced Russian roulette, asphyxiation, and imprisonment in inhumane conditions. There are many individuals with permanently distorted limbs or other disfigurations...
For women, it was an especially violent experience. The commission reports that nearly every female prisoner was the victim of repeated rape. The perpetration of this crime took many forms, from military men raping women themselves to the use of foreign objects on victims. Numerous women (and men) report spiders or live rats being implanted into their orifices. One woman wrote, "I was raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and brother who were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and brother being tortured." Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.

But the crimes of the Pinochet regime were not limited to the sort of horrific domestic human rights abuses chronicled in the over 27,000 confirmed cases of imprisonment and torture documented in the Valech Commission report; as described in a 2005 story by Peter Kornblah, writing for The Nation, on December 13, 2004, at a press conference, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán:

"[A]nnounced that he had ordered Pinochet placed under house arrest and indicted for nine disappearances and one murder relating to Operation Condor--a Chilean-led consortium of secret police agencies that conducted hundreds of acts of state-sponsored terrorism in the Southern Cone and around the world in the mid- and late 1970s. Gasps echoed through the hall, then a ripple of applause, and then the sound of shrieks and tears as those who had lost husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, during Pinochet's seventeen-year regime reacted."

Within a few years of the initial coup, Pinochet's Chile had launched a United States-assisted transnational terrorism syndicate, operating across Latin America's Southern Cone but with operations on other continents as well, known as Operation Condor.
Under Condor, citizens from countries in South America's Central Cone region were abducted, secretly imprisoned, tortured, and murdered or "disappeared" - sometimes by pushing the drugged victims out of planes and helicopters into the ocean. Condor's reach extended even into the domestic United States. The program has been credited with the notorious 1976 car bombing assassination, in Washington D.C.'s Sheridan Circle, of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier.
According to an Operation Condor internal document archive discovered in the early 1990s, by its own accounting the terrorism syndicate, secretly backed by the United States, may have murdered an many as 50,000 people, "disappeared" 30,000, and imprisoned 400,000 others.
The Piñera Plan
As described in his bio at the website of the Koch brothers-funded Cato Institute, José Piñera "is co-chairman of Cato's Project on Social Security Choice and Founder and President of the International Center for Pension Reform. Formerly Chile's Secretary of Labor and Social Security."
Noisily touted by Cato as the architect of Chile's "successful" pension reform, Piñera has for over a decade and a half been in the forefront of the Koch brothers-backed project of eliminating (privatizing) the American Social Security system. In 2005, under the presidential administration of George W. Bush, Congressman Paul Ryan led a failed push in Congress to legislate a Piñera privatization scheme. According to a 2005 Mother Jones story, that scheme:

"[M]ay have had its start on a yacht off the Italian island of Elba in June 1997. As the vessel cruised the Tyrrhenian Sea, José Piñera, once the labor minister for Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, told another passenger--a close friend of Bush's--how he had taken Chile's equivalent of Social Security private. Two months later, Piñera got an invitation to the Texas governor's mansion, where he dined with Bush and Ed Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. Afterward, says Crane, they retired to the library for further discussion about privatization."

1997 was the year that José Piñera, backed by the Koch brothers, began ramping up a push for privatizing the U.S. social security system. In a December 17, 1997 Investor's Business Daily op-ed (reprinted at the Cato Institute website, Piñera aired the subject, before a sympathetic audience:

"America's Social Security system will go bust in 2010. As political leaders scramble to save it, they've overlooked an obvious free-market solution that works. They need only look at Chile.Pay-as-you-go social security systems destroy the link between contributions and benefits, between effort and reward... That's why pay-as-you-go plans are going bankrupt all over the world.
Chile faced that problem in the late '70s. As secretary of labor and social security, I could have postponed the crisis by playing at the edges, increasing payroll taxes a little and slashing benefits a little. But instead of making some cosmetic adjustments, I decided to undertake a structural reform that would solve the problem once and for all...
Could something like this be done in the U.S.? People have said it's utopian and that nobody in the establishment would support privatization, but I believe the situation is changing."

Privatization under Pinochet entailed much more than the Chilean pension system. The first task following the Pinochet coup (besides wholesale imprisonment, execution, and torture of perceived opponents of the regime) was, according to Mother Jones' Barbara T. Dreyfuss, labor reform: "Piñera drafted a major labor law that--while touted as finally granting Chile's repressed workers legal rights--severely restricted organizing, striking, and wage negotiating".
Piñera was only one of a gaggle of neo-liberal laissez-faire American-trained economists who descended upon Chile, to turn the nation into a vast experiment in radical privatization.
In 1975, Milton Friedman went to Chile to advise the Pinochet government on "shock treatment" to right the Chilean economy and, as NYU Latin American History professor Greg Grandin, author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, describes,

"A month after Friedman's visit, the Chilean junta announced that inflation would be stopped "at any cost." The regime cut government spending twenty-seven percent, practically shuttered the national mint, and set fire to bundles of escudos. The state divested from the banking system and deregulated finance, including interest rates. It slashed import tariffs, freed prices on over 2000 products, and removed restrictions against foreign investments. Pinochet pulled Chile out of a number of alliances with neighboring countries intended to promote regional industrialization, turning his country into a gateway for the introduction of cheap goods into Latin America. Tens of thousands of public workers lost their jobs as the government auctioned off, in what amounted to a spectacular transfer of wealth to the private sector, over four hundred state industries. Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate one hundred percent of their profits, but were given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so. In order to build investor confidence, the escudo was fixed to the dollar. Within four years, nearly thirty percent of all property expropriated not just under Allende but under a previous Alliance for Progress land reform was returned to previous owners. New laws treated labor like any other "free" commodity, sweeping away four decades of progressive union legislation. Health care was privatized, as was the public pension fund."

At first, the results of this "shock treatment" were disastrous - "GNP plummeted thirteen percent, industrial production fell 28 percent, and purchasing power collapsed to forty percent of its 1970 level. One national business after another went bankrupt. Unemployment soared", recounts Grandin.
In 1978, the economy had begun to grow again, in a three-year bubble fueled by by foreign investment. At the height of the bubble in 1981, Chile adopted Jose Piñera's new pension reform scheme that, according to Barbara Dreyfuss:

"[R]equired all new workers to sign up for private pension accounts and offered financial incentives for those in the public retirement system to switch.The transition was expensive and funded by slashing government programs, selling off state-owned industries, selling bonds to the new pension funds, and raising taxes."

Driving the new growth was a speculative bubble, especially in the newly-deregulated banking sector, driven by massive influx of foreign investment. In 1982, the economy collapsed again. As Greg Grandin describes:

"The crisis forced the state, dusting off laws still on the books from the Allende period, to take over nearly seventy percent of the banking system and reimpose controls on finance, industry, prices and wages. Turning to the IMF for a bailout, Pinochet extended a public guarantee to repay foreign creditors and banks. "

Milton Friedman was far from the only libertarian-leaning economist smitten by the "Chilean model". As Greg Grandin details, the arch-libertarian economist Friedrich Von Hayek, whose 1944 book Road To Serfdom claimed that government central planning led to tyranny and enslavement of the common man, was impressed by Pinochet's methods:

[Hayek] visited Pinochet's Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile's 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a "remarkable success" but believed that Britain's "democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent" make "some of the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite unacceptable." "

Despite the Chilean economic collapse, rich libertarian American social engineers, apparently untroubled by the admiration evinced by top libertarian thinkers such as Hayek for savage autocratic regimes, were laying policy groundwork to bring Jose Piñera's Chilean "miracle" to the United States.Paul Ryan's social security ideas have followed a strategy put forth in 1983 by the Cato Institute (originally founded in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation) which advised those who wanted to eliminate social security to think like communist revolutionaries, and neutralize the political opposition; social security privatization schemes would only be politically viable if they grandfathered in retirees already receiving benefits and working adults close to retirement age.
In an article (PDF file of article) published in the Fall 1983 issue of The Cato Journal, 'Achieving a "Leninist" Strategy', Cato members Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, positing that government programs like Social Security were as doomed in the same manner as Marx and Lenin believed that capitalism as doomed - inevitably fated to collapse under its own inherent contradictions - wrote,

"[A]s we contemplate basic reforms of the Social Security system, we would do well to draw a few lesson from the Leninist strategy... if we are to achieve basic changes in the system, we must first prepare the political ground... we must recognize that there is a firm coalition behind the current Social Security system... before Social Security can be reformed, we must begin to divide this coalition and cast doubt on the picture of reality it presents to the general public."

In a subsection titled Calming Existing Beneficiaries, Butler and Germanis wrote, "The sine qua non of any successful Social Security reform strategy must be an assurance to those already retired or nearing retirement that their benefits will be paid in full."
That strategy, of calming existing beneficiaries by guaranteeing (grandfathering) their benefits has been a major component of Social Security privatization schemes from Jose Piñera's Chilean plan up to present plans, such as Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan's budget "roadmap".
Indeed, Paul Ryan's proposed four-decade budget plan, "The Path To Prosperity", bears a certain overall resemblance to the radical experiment in government privatization in Chile under Pinochet as well -- while it cuts government much more slowly than the Pinochet approach, Ryan's draconian budget plan all-but annihilates non-defense government spending: the 'compassionate' slow road to radical libertarian government under which every citizen, even the poorest, becomes a venture capitalist who can bootstrap out of poverty through the miracle of the marketplace.
Devil in the details
To be fair, as a pension system approach the Piñera plan does not require the sort of mass executions, torture, and police-state levels of repression that came with the original plan in Chile. Many democracies have since adopted, without bloodshed, variants of Piñera's approach. But at the minimum, Piñera-style approaches do require politicalhonesty. Here's why:
In short, there is no free lunch. The current American social security system is what is known as a "paygo" system: money gets paid in, from employed workers, and it goes out, to retirees.
For advocates of radical, laissez-faire privatization under the sway of Ayn Rand's ideas, such as Piñera and the Chicago School, Paygo systems are anathema, to begin with, because they are moderately redistributive and do not tap the investment potential of the free market.
Piñera's plan set up private investment accounts for Chileans, under a limited number of investment portfolio options. That dramatically reduced the amount of money flowing into Chile's grandfathered "paygo" system. To make up the difference, Chile's government held a massive fire sale of government assets, and dramatically cut all government expenses.
In short, Pinochet's Chile opted to take the national and governmental financial hit that the Piñera plan required all at once, whereas the Ryan social security plan, which would by the fourth decade cut government spending by 90%, would stretch out the financial hit over four decades.
History has shown that, while the Piñera approach can be quite viable, it works best in countries with a broad political consensus and a relatively even level of income distribution -- both of which the United States currently lack.
There's another interesting point too - the original Piñera plan, and the accompanying attempt at radical libertarian economic privatization, didn't work out too well in Chile.
Ironically, privatized pension fund systems tend to cost much more, in administrative overhead, than government-run paygo systems, and the government-approved private pension funds under the Piñera Plan tended to take a substantial bite of investor's money.
Two decades into the "experiment", many retirees on the plan were discovering, to their dismay, that their privatize pension fund investments only paid half of what retirees on the grandfathered government "paygo" system were getting in retirement benefits.
Further, only about half of Chileans were covered under either system. By 2006, Chile's hybrid pension system had become so inequitable and dysfunctional that, by bipartisan Chilean political agreement, the system underwent a major overhaul, to add major subsidies for the poor.
So, the irony is that the radically laissez faire privatization scheme favored by Paul Ryanno longer even exists in Chile. In its pure libertarian form, the original Chilean pension privatization scheme, which featured no economic redistribution whatsoever, failed - at least according to Chilean popular consensus
Moreover, implementing Chilean pension privatization was only possible under a draconian torture regime that, because of its brutal disregard for its own people and democracy, was able to make radical, disruptive structural changes to Chile's economy.
Three decades later, those changes have helped create, despite high rates of economic growth, some of the worst income inequality in South America. By some accounts, Chile has bifurcated into two nations - one rich, one poor, with two school systems.
For the past two years Chile has seen widespread protests over perceived inequality in Chile's education system, that was also partially privatized under Pinochet.
Postscript
In 2008, according to a leaked Wikileaks U.S. diplomatic cable dated December 18, 2008, Paul Ryan visited Chile. The cable states, "Rep. Ryan noted he was impressed with the Chilean pension system."
http://www.alternet.org/economy/where-di...paging=off

[Peter Lemkin]

Springtime For Hitler In Amerika?!?!?! Shit! Ryan thinks Pinochet and that 'model' is great! Gulp! Gee, I wonder what pre-assigned though-prisoner number I have been given. Amerika moves toward the Far Reich with ever greater speed...and I see almost NO resistance from the Sheeple....who bleat in discontent...but have not a clue as to where the problem lies.