4 Billionaire 'Vultures' Trying to Pick Our Next President

In light of the nature of this Article it is completly reposted here and no commentary is needed, Greg Palast needs no introduction and no help from our staff at ALGG at making a point.

Stealing oil from Indian reservations, cheating dying workers out of compensation for asbestos-exposure claims, voter-roll purging -- just some of the work of these kingmakers.

By Greg Palast,
Posted on October 5, 2011
Alternet.org

Hedge fund magnate Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new tablemates: billionaires Ken Langone and the Koch brothers, Charles and David.


Singer has called together the billionaire boys' club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old-fashioned way of choosing presidents -- democracy and counting ballots and all that - has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d'état.


Welcome to the nightmare. Singer, Langone and the Kochs last month decided to elect Chris Christie for us. The New Jersey governor's pseudocampaign went belly up before it began. But that's beside the point. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively ended campaign finance limits and allowed secretive contributions through "corporations," this new combine of the ultrawealthy should not be viewed as just a political threat to the Democrats, but as a threat to democracy.


Let me give you a rundown from my sulphur-scented files on these men who would be king-makers.

Billionaire 1: Ken Langone


Langone likes to be known as the founder of Home Depot, just your local tool guy in a blue apron with a little bag of screws.


But he was also the man, with his right-wing partners, behind Database Technologies. It was in my first investigation of Langone in 2000 that I discovered that DBT had created a list of several thousand "felons" - most of them black, all of them innocent, all of them purged from Florida's voter rolls by DBT's client, Katherine Harris. And Langone's company knew exactly what was going on.


What qualifies Langone to pick our president? In his own words: "I'm nuts; I'm rich."


Billionaires 2 and 3: David and Charles Koch


You think you've read all about the billionaire brothers. Well, there's more:


In 1996, an FBI agent, Richard Elroy, told my team that oil had been pilfered from the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. He and other G-men filmed the filch-theft, say witnesses, personally ordered by Charles Koch. A few barrels here, a few barrels there.

It all added up: to about a billion and a half dollars in looted petroleum, says one expert, a third of the Koch fortune at the time. David and Charles shared in the booty via their private company, Koch Industries.


Billionaire 4: Paul Singer


Now we get to the carrion king, Paul Singer, known as Singer The Vulture. I didn't give him the moniker. The name Vulture was tagged on him and his speculator colleagues by the prime minister of Britain and the World Bank. Recently, former United Nations envoy Winston Tubman suggested I ask Singer or his business associates, "Do you know you're causing babies to die?"


What does this guy do -- put poison in kiddies' milk? Worse: he takes away the milk.


Singer's modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the United States and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations' debts, then waits at bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces, legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage.

Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. At BBC TV's Newsnight, we learned that Singer demanded $400 million dollars from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn't get his 4,000 percent profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don't mean that figuratively -- I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition.


For BBC, I tried to ask Vulture Singer the diplomat's question about the baby-killing, but I couldn't get past George Gershwin. (In the New York office tower housing the billionaires' roost, a Gershwin lookalike in top hat and tails plays show tunes on a grand piano for Singer's grand entrance.)


And it's not just poor African carcasses that tempt Singer. Indeed, during my investigation for my new book, Vultures' Picnic, I discovered that Singer's first big vulture attack was on American asbestos victims.


Background: The executives of three companies -- vermiculate mine operator WR Grace, wallboard manufacturer USG and building materials company Owens Corning -- knew that asbestos exposure in their respective operations was killing their workers. When caught and sued, the companies filed for bankruptcy, agreeing to pay almost all of their earnings to the people who were dying and injured by their asbestos.


But Singer had a better idea. These companies, as you can imagine, were worth next to nothing, and Singer bought Owens Corning for a song.

If he could cut the amount paid to the victims, Singer could boost Corning's value big time. So, a public relations campaign began, attacking the dying workers, saying they were all faking it.


One attacker was a guy named George W. Bush.


In January 2005, President Dubya held a televised meeting to promote an "expert" who pronounced that over half a million workers suing Singer's industry were liars. If workers couldn't breathe, he said to the grinning president, it wasn't the fault of asbestos.


The "expert" was not a doctor, but, notably, his "research" was partly funded by ... Paul Singer. And so was Bush. Since the death of Enron's Ken Lay, Singer and his vulture flock at Singer's hedge fund, Elliott International, had become the top contributors to the Republican National Committee. It's hard to measure his largess exactly because some of that help comes in through the side door. For example, Singer put money behind the Swift Boat smear on Bush's opponent, John Kerry.


The legal, political and public relations attacks on the dying workers chiseled away the compensation expected to be paid by the asbestos companies, boosting their net worth. Singer then flipped Corning, selling it for a neat billion-dollar profit.


It's legal. It's brilliant. It's sick. It's Singer.

One of my favorite Singer scores was his successful scheme to legally loot the Treasury of Peru. The nation's US lawyer told me, aghast, how Singer let Peru's rogue President, Alberto Fujimori, flee his nation to avoid murder charges. Singer had seized Fujimori's getaway plane. The Vulture named his price: one of Fujimori's last acts as president before he fled was to order his dirt-poor nation to pay Singer $58 million.


Why the Billionaires Need to Buy the White House


A Koch Industries executive (not knowing he was being taped) said he had asked Charles Koch, who already had a billion from an inheritance, why Koch was pocketing a few bucks a week from poor American Indians. Koch told him, "I want my fair share, and that's all of it."


And "all of it," of course, includes the White House.


Putting Bush in the White House was worth his weight in gold to these gents - more, in fact. And now, the Kochs, Singer and Langone have teamed up to pick a candidate they pray can take back their real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.


The Gimme for Langone

Langone's firm DBT's "felon" scrub list included only innocent people, so you certainly wouldn't find the name "Langone" on it. In 2004, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged Langone with conspiracy, accusing the billionaire with subverting a stock exchange regulator's investigation into monkey business by Langone's investment bank.


A technicality ended the civil action on the conspiracy charge.


But now, Obama's new banking and securities reforms, albeit weak, give regulators new enforcement powers and provide an extra independent eye on stock market shenanigans. For Langone, picking the president means closing the regulatory eye.


The Gimme for The Kochs


FBI man Elroy told our investigators that the Justice Department was going to let the FBI cuff Charles Koch on criminal charges for the theft of the Osage Indian oil. But then, fumes Elroy, Koch's well-funded buddies, then-senators Bob Dole and Don Nickles, stepped in - and Koch walked. No charges.

Dennis DeConcini, then an Arizona senator, wanted to know why criminal or civil charges were never brought against the Kochs. That was not a wise question to ask. The senator told me that the Kochs threatened his political destruction if the Congressional committee he chaired continued with its investigations of the theft of Native oil. He continued, but his political career did not.


During the Clinton administration, Koch Industries was charged with criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. Under President Bush, the charges, but not the water, were cleaned up.


In other words, crime pays -- if you get to pick the sheriff.


The Gimme for Paul Singer


Paul Singer had placed a big bet on the asbestos industry, then, set out to fix the casino, helping install Bush in the White House. That is, he had a president willing to beat up on asbestos workers and push for so-called "tort reform" that undermined these victims' claims. What the victims lost, Singer gained.


But there's trouble on the horizon for Singer. In 2007, Britain outlawed Singer and all other Vulture speculators in Third World debt from collecting their pound of flesh in the United Kingdom. Other European nations are following suit.

Several US Congressmen are pushing a UK-style prohibition on Singer's activities. (Even Chevron Corporation is complaining about the Vulture attacks. When Chevron calls bankers unscrupulous, they've got to be really unscrupulous.) Without a veto pen over Congress, Singer stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.


Singer plays defense, but is best at offense: to collect on some of his claims against Argentina, his lobbyists have pushed a bill in Congress to put an economic chokehold on trade with the South American nation. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blocked this crazy attack on our ally. As a result, Singer is not a happy gaucho. There will be blood. Obama will have to pay.


The Gimme for Them All


There's one thing that every billionaire wants: another billion. And that's threatened by Obama's plan to tax the "carried interest" tax deferment.


Guys like Singer and Langone don't pay taxes like you and I do. While we pay taxes on income, the profits from vulture speculation and arbitrage are often recorded as "carried interest," effectively not taxed. It's a billion-dollar benefit for the billionaires, and every Republican candidate has sworn to keep this loophole open and make sure you and I pay Singers' taxes for him.

Unfortunately for Singer, the Kochs and Langone, the GOP candidates currently kissing the billionaires' behinds don't seem electable.


So the Billionaire Boys Club prodded Gov. Christie, a bully-boy from Jersey, to muscle his way into the Oval Office. Christie didn't fly, no surprise. But whether they pick the GOP candidate or retreat to their old tactics of smear-from-the-rear, the fragile thing called democracy stands little chance against the tsunamic powers of the quartet's combined checkbooks.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
View Palast's reports for BBC TV and Democracy Now! at gregpalast.com.

© 2011 TruthOut.org All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152625/

Corporate Psychopaths, like we didnt already know

...the researchers "pitted a group of stockbrokers against a group of actual psychopaths in various computer simulations and intelligence tests and found that the money men were significantly more reckless, competitive, and manipulative." Even more striking, the researchers note that achieving overall success was less important to the stock speculators than the sadistic drive "to damage their opponents."

...the award winning-documentary "The Corporation" used World Health Organization metrics to show that if companies really are "people," as our Supreme Court insists, then many of them are mentally ill.

Obviously, these results reflect the not-so-surprising fact that the extreme nature of the modern political process and of today's casino economy inherently self-select for certain kinds of traits. And no doubt, wholly changing that dynamic may be impossible or undesirable — or both.

However, the findings are a reminder of why now — more than ever — we must refuse to succumb to political apathy and laissez-faire demagoguery. Indeed, it's time to redouble our commitment to strengthening checks on political and corporate power because that power is often being wielded by the most unstable among us.

SOURCE LINK

The Corporation (2-Disc Special Edition)

The Good Old Days...

This is what the Republicans are talking about when they want to roll back regulations, wages, unions, etc etc. They call it "The Good Old Days"

FROM WIKIPEDIA

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914.


The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent.


Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).

The attack on Women, Unions, Pell Grants, Green Energy, and Public Radio. Again.

So this is the current Big Plan from the Right aka Cheap Labor Regressives...

The bill stipulates that no more federal money could be spent on the government’s main family planning program, Title X of the Public Health Service Act, established more than 40 years ago. The program provides services to more than five million people a year at more than 4,500 clinics.


On education, the House bill would maintain the maximum Pell grant at $5,550 but restrict eligibility, barring grants to students who attend college less than half time.


Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents 1,600 colleges and universities, estimated that the bill would eliminate Pell grants for a million students, or roughly 10 percent of those now eligible, while reducing the cost of the program by $3.5 billion, also 10 percent.


Since many states have increased tuition at public colleges, Mr. Hartle said, the bill would mean that “low- and middle-income families will face higher college costs with less student aid.”


With the bill, House Republicans try again, for the third time this year, to cut off federal money for NPR, the public radio network.

The House bill would also block numerous rules intended to protect workers. For example, the National Labor Relations Board could not use any money to enforce a new requirement that employers notify workers of their rights to form and join unions.


The House bill would also eliminate money for a Labor Department program that trains workers for “green jobs” in energy-efficient industries. It would virtually shut down a Labor Department office that helps communities hurt by the downturn in the auto industry.

Read More Here

George Carlin The American Dream speech

Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.


Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.


They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:


They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.


Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!


You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! Its a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.


By the way, its the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.


They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.


Its called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Koch Brothers' Business Dealings with Iran

Controversial Republican billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch -- who have spent untold millions bankrolling right-wing candidates and causes -- are now the subject of a new Bloomberg investigation that shows Koch Industries profited from business with Iran.


This is all despite American trade sanctions against Iran and the country’s known links to financing terrorists. House Republican Leadership’s response: Silence.


This is unacceptable. We can’t let this stand.


Sign our petition right now calling for Speaker Boehner and House Republicans to immediately demand an investigation of Koch Industries’ business dealings with Iran.

http://www.dccc.org/pages/kochbrothers

Its not 'Punk Rock' to support Oppression or Why you should Burn your 'Chucks'

Thats right, NIKE uses slave labor, not like its news or anything... AND Converse was bought by NIKE in 1997 so burn your Chucks while your at it... Your not 'punk rock' when you support oppression!

More than a decade ago, shoe giant Nike came under fire for its use of sweatshop labor in the production of its products. Most of the criticism focused on its Indonesian workforce, where workers, largely young women, were forced to labor under harsh conditions and abusive supervisors. In 1997, filmmaker Michael Moore made Nike’s abuses a subject of his film “The Big One,” and met with Nike CEO Phil Knight. Knight explained that the reason his company was using low-wage labor in Indonesia is because “Americans don’t want to make shoes.”

SOURCE LINK

NIKE buys Converse Story Here

Goldman Sachs hookers and cocaine budget $500 Mil a year

No really, its true...

STORY AND LINKS TO MULITIPLE STORIES; CLICK HERE

Is the Tea Party Treasonous?

Now a lot of people may think calling these actions treason may be going a little too far on my part, but I strongly disagree. Sure, in a traditional sense we think of treason as selling secrets to a foreign government, or switching sides from our military to our enemy’s, like Benedict Arnold. But, especially these days when multi-national corporations and conglomerations are at least as powerful as most, if not all, nations on Earth – particularly when you look not just at the individual companies but their entire industries as a whole, treason can no longer be narrowly defined as betraying your country to another country. Rather, we have to realize that betrayal is betrayal no matter who they sell out to, be it another nation, or a corporation, conglomerate, or lobbyist. Fact is, a back-stabber is a back-stabber no matter where they got the knife.

SOURCE HERE

Women forced to give birth in shackles!

Just when you thought the nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants couldn’t get any more brutal, the Huffington Post reports that pregnant women in Arizona and Tennessee were detained and forced to give birth while shackled to their hospital beds because they couldn’t produce identification.

Like Villegas, Alma Chacon, and Miriam Mendiola-Martinez gave birth in the United States shackled to their hospital beds, without their husbands, and in the presence of a prison guard. They also were not violent criminals, but rather, they were all undocumented and charged with an immigration-related offense in Sheriff Arpaio’s jurisdiction of Maricopa County, Arizona.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Video Roundup of Tea Party Dupes vs Real Protests

Do they really think that if the side with their corporate masters and throw the poor and disabled into the streets to die that the rich will reward them with a better life? Do they really think the rich intend to share? They will just be the next in line to be cast aside...



And Im sure most of these Tea Party people go to church too, so what the hell are they harassing sick people for? Do you think they wold have screamed at Michael J Fox?



WOW!



Thugs will do anything for their Corporate Masters... But that doesnt mean we wont gather ourselves no matter how much the rich send thier jackboots to attack us...



David and Charles Koch are lifelong libertarian billionaires who have donated millions of dollars and funded many right-wing conservative causes, including the Tea Party. Editor for The Exiled, Yasha Levine, first broke the connection between the Tea Party and the billionaire Koch brothers in Playboy.com in February 2009.





At least the 'Angry Liberal' crowd knows who is really responsible for whats happening in America today. Instead of standing in the streets harrassing and yelling at sick people.

BIGGER BETTER - Animation by Studio Smack

A deconstruction of the American dream.