Margaret Thatcher is Dead

Goodbye and good riddance!

The one woman who singlehandedly started the destruction of the UK, a destruction which has been ongoing ever since she came into office. As the US has had an over 30 year run of conservatism, so has the UK, almost unique among Western countries. As Reagan was to America, so Thatcher was to the UK. A cancer. She imposed Reaganism on the UK the same way that Reagan imposed Thatcherism on the US.

So began a 30 year plus experiment with neoliberalism, which is still ongoing to predictable catastrophic results in most of the world. Even Clinton (“The era of Big Government is over”) and most certainly Obama (“Reagan is my hero”) are following in Reagan/Thatcher’s footsteps and are essentially both Reaganites/Thatcherites. That’s what I mean when I say there is no Democratic Party anymore.

What we have is two Reaganite Republican Parties:

The Liberal Republican Party (“Democrats”)
The Conservative Republican Party (“Republicans”)

This has been the case more or less since Reagan came into office, certainly after the rise of the nightmarish rightwing Democratic National Committee (DNC) around 1990 or so.

After Reagan showed up, “liberal” turned into a dirty word, where it never was before. Now even liberals don’t want to be called liberals, as if there is something shameful about it.

Even after Reaganite/Thatcherite neoliberalism has devastated the entire globe, killing tens of millions of people by massive cuts in social spending and recently crashing the economy of the whole world into the worst depression since the 1930′s, still Americans, the British and most of the political parties on Earth remain addicted to neoliberalism. In fact, not only are they addicted to the cancer that crashed the Earth’s economy, they are doubling down on the poison with massive austerity imposed the world over, a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

The fact is that neoliberalism is great for elites, and it is the elites who run the world. So the elites will never tire of neoliberalism and will always seek to make the world an even more neoliberal or hopefully libertarian place, since this benefits their economic position. Elite rule has become entrenched the world over since 1980, as the social contracts in the West and elsewhere in the world have been shredded by elites under a variety of excuses.

Prior to 1980, labor and consumers had a lot of power. Overtly socialist parties were in power in most of the West and certainly in the Third World. That’s all gone now. Only the rich and their allies in the upper middle class hold any power on most of the Earth. It’s the rule of the 20%. So the Top 20% are having a dictatorship over the bottom 80%. That’s neoliberalism in a nutshell. And there is seemingly no end to it.

And you can thank the Iron Lady and the Great Communicator for that. Very much.

Gore Won Florida 2000

Here is the official paper, seldom linked and even more seldom read, showing that, according to a Washington Post scientific recount, Gore would have won the election if all of the votes were counted. The paper is quite confusing, so read it yourself and see what you can get out of it. The most important data is in red on page 8. The paper also conclusively lies to rest forever the debates about hanging chads, etc.

The thing that struck me about 2000 was that most of the Republicans (all White males) I knew seemed to know that Bush stole the election, but did not care. One more reason to cheer the gradual decline in White votes in the US, despite the considerable downside this involves. Whites, especially White men, are simply a force for reaction at least since 1980, and that is all there is to it.

The whole rightwing nightmare since 1980, continuing into the moment, may be laid at the feet of American White people. Looking for someone to blame? Blame White people, especially White men. The decline of Whites in America holds a considerable downside, but on the upside, we will finally defeat one of the worst forces of reaction in modern America – White people.

White men are now probably about 31% of the vote, declining from 39% in 1996. The decline is now going at @1% a year. There is a plus and minus to this, but on the upside, we can (tentatively) finally look forward to pushing a genuinely progressive agenda (at least in some ways) in America.

The article linked here also shows that White male union members are still voting Democratic, as they rightly should, though the article dishonestly questions whether this is in their best interest.

I am looking for something else. A progressive candidate that opposes illegal immigration and open borders, fights Black and Hispanic racism as much as the White variety, turns a dim eye on multiculturalism and legal immigration, is tough on crime, and puts the American worker first and the capitalist parasites a distant second. Surely we are not stuck with the reactionaries of the Whites versus the PC hispandering clowns of the Left?

Or how about, at the very least, European style social democracy, pro-worker and anti-corporate? Is it too much to ask?

I know I will die before this person wins office.

Bipartisan Support for Slavery in America

Here.

This stunning article from Alternet touches on a subject that no US news outlet will touch as they are all corporate outlets: the profound and inhumane abuse of immigrants via the H-2B guestworker program. On its surface, the H-2B program has no right to exist at all. Its existence is based on the notion that for some bizarre reason, the employer cannot find any or enough Americans to fill the needed the jobs. Nevertheless, most H-2B workers work in places with double digit unemployment.

The last time I was in Yosemite, where I formerly lived, the place was swarming with H-2B guestworkers. When I lived there in 1977, there was not a single job that went open for lack of a US worker to fill it. Now that corporate criminal Delaware North has taken over concessions from the more fair though still abusive Curry Company, many to most of the positions are filled with H-2B guestworkers, easier to abuse and mistreat.

The list of jobs in need of H-2B guestworkers is utterly amazing. One of them is “welder.” In shipyards all up and down the US Gulf Coast, thousands of welding jobs formerly filled by proud American workers are now filled by hyper-exploited H-2B guestworkers. Apparently, “welder” is one of those jobs that Americans just won’t do.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration quickly passed a directive allowing enforcement-free mass importation of immigrants, legal and illegal, to do cleanup and rebuilding work in New Orleans. That there were countless able-bodied Blacks in New Orleans was overlooked, or maybe it wasn’t. This directive was passed for one reason and one reason only – so that corporations exploiting the rebuilding process would not have to hire New Orleans Blacks, or any Americans for that matter, to do the work. Instead, tens of thousands of post-Katrina jobs that could have gone to the desperate Blacks of New Orleans went to 25,000 illegal alien criminals.

Scarcely a single word was heard in protest of this directive. All Democrats and all US liberals will fall all over themselves to do anything to worship the Illegal Alien and Immigrant God that they prostrate themselves over. Conservatives will not say a peep because immigrants, legal and illegal cheaply replace costly US workers, On both sides of the aisle, on the Left and the Right, the polarized sides of the political chamber fall all over themselves to beat the US worker to a bloody mass of a pulp.

And it is true: If liberals and Democrats could replace the vast majority of US workers with immigrants, legal or illegal, no matter how exploited, they would do it in a heartbeat. And there is not a conservative who would not do the same.

The abuses of the H-1B program among tech workers in the US and especially in Silicon Valley are many and legion. Yet the loudest champions of the program, a knife expertly aimed at the pulsing heart of the US tech worker, are US Democrats, often liberal Democrats. Of course all Republicans support the plan. And Barack Obama loves nothing so much as he loves his H-1B wage slaves and job thieves.

It is interesting that a progressive organization, in this case, the sickening worms of Morris Dees’ SPLC, are actually protesting about abuses of US workers under the H-2B program. It is incredible that anyone on the Left would attack worker abuses of any kind. Yet the truth is sadder than it appears. The SPLC only wrote this report because the workers being abused were their cherished immigrants. The SPLC would never waste a tear on US workers. Like the rest of the US Left, they care only about immigrant job-thieves. There is no room in their heart for the abused American worker. US workers only get the sympathy of the Left if they hail from some foreign shore.

And what is the SPLC’s solution to the abuses of the H-2B program? A responsible position would be to support the reforms of the program outlined a bill killed with the indispensable help of Senate Democrats. But we know that the SPLC goes far beyond this. The SPLC, like the entire US Left, is an Open Borders organization. Their preferred solution would be abolish the H-2B program and open the US borders to hundreds of millions from the around the world who would quickly funnel through through our ungated edges.

And so we have it: when it comes to US workers, we truly have no friends. The Democrats and Republicans are both corporate capitalist parties, and as such will always oppose the workers when the interests of the workers and our elected leaders corporate masters collide. Selling one’s soul is simple, but it always comes with a price. And indeed, the loudest champions of the horrific slave labor abuses of the H-2B programs have been Democrats, including Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, usually typed as a liberal Democrat.

What we need is a pro-working class party in America. A party that will always or nearly always side with working class Americans, and I emphasize Americans. In the conflict between American workers and foreign invaders and job thieves, the position of the working class party should be obvious.

Rubio Willing to Shut Down Government if Obamacare Not Defunded

Insane Republicans threatening to shut down the US government again. How many times have they threatened this so far? And how many times have they actually done it? Americans are pretty much the most insanely reactionary people on Earth. No population on Earth would tolerate shutting down the national government, and certainly no people anywhere would actually think it was a good idea.

The reason Americans think shutting down the government is cool is because Americans are basically a Libertarian people. That is, the average Moronican hates the government so much that he is actually opposed to the very existence of the state. Therefore, shutting down the government is not only not a bad idea but it is a pretty damn good idea. The less government the better, and no government at all is the preferred solution. This is how the insane American thinks.

It is true that in most of the world, especially the 3rd World, the rich have little to no need for the state, even the 3rd World rich would not tolerate shutting down the national government. That is because the 3rd World rich are not really Libertarians. Instead, they like the state because they have captured it. The rich own the state and use it to their advantage. In the 3rd World, the rich use the rich-controlled state to help them make money and to keep the working classes down and repressed where they belong. To the 3rd World rich, shutting down the government in general would be a bad idea.

In a few places, there is a large wealthy class but the state is in the hands of the working classes. States like Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela come to mind. However, even here, the rich have not tried to shut down the state altogether.

Shutting down the state is not only insane but it’s also very irresponsible if you think about it. It’s definitely a uniquely American form of insanity.

In some ways, US politics may well be the worst politics on Earth, and the political views of the average American are near the bottom of the barrel compared to the politics of citizens of most other countries.

PROGRESO WEEKLY

Rubio Willing to Shut Down Government if Obamacare Not Defunded

By Sy Mukherjee

During an interview on conservative host Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio program [last week], Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined fellow Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in demanding that a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year include provisions to defund Obamacare in its entirety.

Over the course of the program, Rubio parroted the usual litany of wild – and widely debunked – conservative hysteria about the dire consequences that Obamacare will have on American businesses and the U.S. health care industry, asserting that he would only vote to avert a government shutdown if Obamacare implementation is halted completely:

HEWITT: Senator Rubio, the continuing resolution is headed your way. How is this stacking up as Act III of the spending drama?

RUBIO: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that’s where we’re headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem… But here’s what I’ve said about this continuing resolution. Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund Obamacare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence, if they get a continuing resolution and we can get a vote on that and pass that onto the bill, I’ll vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent, and that’s defund this health care bill, this Obamacare bill, that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy.

You’re already starting to feel the outer edges of that… I already am running into businesses that are planning next year on not hiring people or laying some people off so they don’t have to meet these mandates. Others are going to push their employees off of their private plans that they offer and onto these exchanges, driving up the cost for the public. So this is going to be an implementation disaster. It’s going to hurt our economy severely. And we’re not spending enough time talking about that.

Later on, Hewitt asked if Rubio would settle for partially defunding Obamacare – specifically, by repealing a provision levying a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices – in exchange for funding the government. Rubio replied, “I don’t know if that alone would be enough” to secure his vote for the continuing resolution, but that he “certainly would support that amendment.”

Defunding the health reform law would devastate tens of millions of Americans who would no longer receive federal subsidies for purchasing health insurance or have expanded access to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. It would also fly in the face of public opinion, since the majority of Americans believe that implementing Obamacare should be a “top priority” in their state. And contrary to some Republicans’ claims, a government shutdown would be a decidedly bad development for essential government services and the American economy at large.

Conn Hallinan, “Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget”

Nice piece on Chavez.

Hugo Chavez: Lest We Forget

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed.”

Conn Hallinan
Dispatches From The Edge: March 11, 2013

Paying Last Respects

In early December 2001, I was searching through my files looking for a column topic. At the time I was writing on foreign policy for the San Francisco Examiner, one of the town’s two dailies. A back page clip I had filed and forgotten caught my attention: on Nov. 7 the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department had convened a two-day meeting on U.S. policy vis-a-vis Venezuela. My first thought was, “Uh, oh.”

I knew something about those kinds of meetings. There was one in 1953 just before the CIA and British intelligence engineered the coup in Iran that put the despicable Shah into power. Same thing for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.

Chavez had reaped the ire of the Bush administration when, during a speech condemning the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he asked if bombing Afghanistan in retaliation was a good idea? Chavez called it “fighting terrorism with terrorism,” not a very good choice of words, but, in retrospect, spot on. The invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Iraqi War have been utterly disastrous for the U.S. and visited widespread terror on the populations of both countries. Upwards of a million Iraqis died as a direct and indirect effect of the war, five million were turned into refugees, and the bloodshed is far from over. Much the same-albeit on a smaller scale-is happening to the Afghans.

Would that we had paid the man some attention.

But for the Bush administration, Chavez’s statement presented an opportunity to rid itself of a troublesome voice. In came the White House’s Latin America “A Team.”

The top gun in that odious outfit was Otto Reich, assistant secretary of state for western hemispheric affairs and former Reagan Administration point man for the 1981-87 Contra War against Nicaragua. The General Accounting Office had nailed Reich during the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal for “prohibited convert propaganda,” planting false stories and opinion pieces in newspapers. A Cuban exile, Reich had helped spring Orlando Bosch in 1987 from a Venezuelan prison where Bosch was in jail for bombing a civilian Cuban airliner and killing 73 people.

Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for western hemisphere affairs, also a Cuban exile and former chief of staff for the Contras, was the Pentagon side of the team.

While Reich met with civilian opponents of Chavez and conservative businessman Pedro Carmona, Pardo-Maurer huddled with military leaders, including Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon. Carmona and Rincon would play a key role in the April 11, 2002 coup against Chavez. The National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development were also supporting Chavez’s opponents with money and advice, and both organizations have long histories of subversion and covert operations.

I had no special information about the possibility of a coup but it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the armies of the night were on the move. So I wrote a column titled “Coup in the Wind” that laid out the meetings, identified the actors, and reminded readers that the U.S. has a long and sordid history of organizing and supporting coups in Latin America.

A little more than three and a half months later, the plotters struck, arrested Chavez, suspended the constitution, dissolved the legislature, dismissed the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the National Election Commission, and fired provincial governors. We had seen this all before, and I flinched at what I thought would inevitably follow: executions, death squads, “disappeared” opponents, smashed unions, and a cowed population.

But April 11, 2002 was not 1954 in Guatemala, 1964 in Brazil, 1973 in Chile, or 1976 in Argentina. Chavez had lifted millions of people out of poverty, opened schools, increased literacy, and tackled malnutrition. In vast numbers those people rose up, and, for the first time in Latin American history, a coup was overturned.

Three days after Chavez was returned to office, Martha Honey at Foreign Policy In Focus sent me an email saying she liked the coup column and would I consider writing a follow-up for the think tank? I knew all about Martha Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan. As reporters for the Costa Rican Tico Times, they had uncovered much of the Iran-Contra plot and were legends among those of us in the alternative press. I also knew about FPIF. It is hard to write sensible things about U.S. foreign policy without it. So I did a piece called Anatomy of a Coup, detailing U.S. support for the plotters. Since then I have written over 200 columns, so in a way it was Hugo Chavez that landed me at FPIF.

Chavez became the president of a country where 70 percent of the population was considered “poor,” in spite of $30 billion in yearly oil revenues. It was a country where two percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, and where the gap between rich and poor was among the widest on the continent.

Today, according to the Gini Coefficient, Venezuela has the lowest rate of inequality in Latin America. Poverty has been reduced to 21 percent, and extreme poverty from 40 percent to 7.3 percent. Illiteracy has been eliminated and, proportionally, Venezuela is number two in Latin America for the number of university students. Infant mortality has dropped from 25 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000, the same as it is for Black Americans.

Chavez’s government increased the number of health clinics by 169.6 percent and hands out free food to five million Venezuelans. Take a moment to read The Achievements of Hugo Chavez by public health experts Carles Muntaner, Joan Benach, and sociologist Maria Paez Victor in CounterPunch.

Comparing the man’s accomplishments to his U.S. obits was like taking a trip through Alice’s looking glass. Virtually none of the information about poverty and illiteracy was included, and when it was grudgingly admitted that he did have programs for the poor, it was “balanced” ; with claims of soaring debts, widespread shortages, rampant crime, economic chaos, and “authoritarian ism.”

Venezuela’ s debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is lower than that of the U.S. and Europe. Inflation has fallen to a four-year low. There is crime, but neighboring Colombia is far more dangerous, particularly if you happen to be a trade unionist. And more people in Venezuela are eating better than they have ever eaten in the history of the country. Over the past decade growth has averaged 4. 3 percent, and joblessness dropped from 11.3 percent to 7.7 percent. Americans would kill for those figures.

As for being an “authoritarian ,” most the country’ s media is venomously anti-Chavez and publishes regularly, and his opponents hold weekly rallies and protests. Want to try that in U.S. ally Honduras (or Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, etc.)?

The old Venezuelan elites-aided by the U.S.-will now attempt to turn the clock back to 1997, the year before Chavez took over. But that will not be easy. Quite literally millions of people have been brought into the democratic process and they will not cede power without a fight. Once people have better housing, schools, nutrition, jobs and health care, it is very difficult to take those things away. Chavez handed a better life to the vast majority of Venezuelans, and, as they demonstrated in April 2002, they are perfectly able to defend those gains.

“Charismatic and idiosyncratic, capable of building friendships. Communicating to the masses as few other leaders ever have, Mr. Chavez will be missed,” is the way former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva put it.

He will be missed, indeed.

Filibuster Abuse

Extreme abuse of the filibuster by Republicans.

Under Barack Obama, Republicans have engaged in extreme abuse of the filibuster option to kill anything they don’t like in the Senate. The filibuster allows a minority to block any legislation they don’t like by invoking the filibuster option. Then you need a 60 vote supermajority to bypass the filibuster and that is very hard to get.

Normally, the filibuster was when someone got up and spoke forever and ever, often reading from newspapers or from the dictionary. Others would take his place to keep it going. This type of filibuster is more reasonable as it was the traditional kind. However, lately the Republicans have been simply invoking some type of filibuster that does not mandate that they get up in the Senate and talk forever. This is a more hazy and sleazy type of filibuster.

People on the Left have been calling for an end to filibuster abuse for a while now. A recent reform of the filibuster finally made it through the Senate, changing Senate rules. The Republicans were completely obstructive in all attempts to change filibuster rules. The reform bill originally was very moderate and reasonable. Any sensible person could have gone along with it.

But almost all of the teeth were stripped out of it somehow by Harry Reid and other Democrats possibly caving in to Republican demands. The result was a pathetic joke of a bill. It’s not completely understood why Reid stripped everything good out of the bill, but he had a lot of help from other Senate Democrats. No one quite knows why the Democrats refused to fight for sensible filibuster reform. They seem to be spineless wonders.

On the plus side, the Republicans actually agreed to change Senate rules. Changing the rules of the Senate is something that is almost never done, and it was indeed amazing that it was done in this case. However, the result was some tiny changes that will do almost nothing to solve the problem at hand.

Greg Palast on Hugo Chavez

This article shows exactly how US imperialism works in the world today. It also shows just how evil US foreign policy really is. Now whether the behavior portrayed below is evil or good is a value judgment. I say it’s evil. Someone else may feel it’s the right thing to do.

But one thing for sure, the true story, as Greg Palast lays out below, is one you will never hear on US TV or radio or read in any US newspaper or magazine. The US media won’t even bring up charges like this even to deny them. Can you imagine if every day in the US you could turn on your TV to a debate on whether or not the US is an imperialist country? That’s a debate they don’t want you to have, even to deny it.

Problem is that no matter how hard they deny it, they don’t want you to hear the other side at all. There is too much risk that no matter how hard they ridicule the other side, a few people might decide to side with the opposition. A few Americans here and there might decide that, yes, the US is an imperialist country.

That the US is an imperialist country and that US capitalism is based on imperialism is beyond a doubt. There’s nothing to debate. It’s obviously true. Even the scores of US military bases and the huge US military are the armed faction of that imperial system. When you go enlist in the US military, you are joining as a foot soldier for imperialism, in general. You are carrying a weapon for Heinz, the Koch Brothers and Chevron more than you are defending US soil from shadowy enemies.

Almost all supporters of US capitalism (and we have many here on this blog) refuse to acknowledge that US capitalism is based on imperialism. Imperialism is its bread and butter.

It’s fine and dandy to support capitalism (I am not completely against the market myself), but I think if you support US capitalism, you ought to at least agree that it’s based on imperialism. That would be the brave and principled thing to do. And now do you support this system, this particular US capitalism buttressed by imperialism as laid out below. To me, that is a much harder thing to do, but supporters or US capitalism need to do that. They need to take a stand on imperialism. You either support US imperialism or you oppose it. Which will it be? No more dodging the question and pretending that imperialism doesn’t exist.

It is also interesting that we have Blacks on this board who hated Hugo Chavez. Yet Chavez was the great champions of the Blacks and Browns of Venezuela, as laid out below. Venezuelan capitalism, as is the case with capitalism in many parts of the world, was racially based. The Whites took all the money and left the Blacks and Browns with crumbs – starving, sickened, squatting in hovels with sewage running down the steep gutters. Why US Blacks would support such a racial spoils system is beyond me.

There is much talk that Chavez and other Latin American Leftists were all given cancer by the US. It’s an interesting theory, but there is no evidence for it at the moment.

I had an Argentine girlfriend once. We talked about the Dirty War in Argentina, supported to the hilt by the US (Henry Kissinger notoriously backed them to the hilt), in which 30,000 mostly unarmed and peaceful Leftists were murdered by a rightwing military dictatorship.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully. “The Latin American Left dreamed of a better world. And in Latin America, that is a dangerous thing.”

So it is with Hugo Chavez, so it is with the Americas, of which we in the north are increasingly a part.

“But why the GW Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer: Its the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.”

Vaya con Dios, Hugo Chàvez, mi Amigo

By Greg Palast

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: Its the oil. And its the Koch Brothers and its the ketchup.

Reverend Pat Robertson said, Hugo Chavez thinks were trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush’s State Department. Despite Bush’s providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we’ll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime’s hate, hate, HATE of the President of Venezuela? Reverend Pat wasn’t coy about the answer: It’s the oil. This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.

A really BIG pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela hold a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

If we didn’t kill Chavez, we’d have to do an Iraq on his nation. So the Reverend suggests, We don’t need another $200 billion war…. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush’s attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.

So what made Chavez suddenly “a dangerous enemy”? Here’s the answer you wont find in The New York Times:

Just after Bush’s inauguration in 2001, Chavez congress voted in a new Law of Hydrocarbons. Henceforth, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70% of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezuela’s prior government into giving them 84% of the sales price, a cut to 70% was no bueno. Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty just one percent on heavy crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they’d now have to pay 16.6%.

Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of the nations Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela giving a whole new meaning to the term, corporate takeover.

U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed President and the leaders of the coup détat.

Bush’s White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, democratically elected, but, he added, Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters. I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk within 48 hours.

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. Its what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela’s One Percent to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the ranchos, the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.

He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course. She was disgusted by them, the 80% of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (Black and Indian)and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela’s history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves Spanish, to the dark-skinned masses.

While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,

Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The oil boom we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn’t see it.

But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he said, get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to sign their own papers.”

Chavez Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, We are no longer an oil colony, went further…too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez congress passed in a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela’s politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his Alliance for Progress.

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn’t like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn’t realize that he’d just squeezed the tomatoes of Americas powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz husband, Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn’t give a damn.

Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon presidency, even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of Americas least forgiving billionaires: The Koch Brothers.

How? Well, that’s another story for another day.

Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP’s fields (1953), Elchibey, President of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidentals drilling concession (2005).

Its a chess game, Mr. Palast, Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long, and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. And I am, Chavez said, a very good chess player.

In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster played a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the ranchos. The One Percent of Venezuela, planning on Chavez’s death to return them the power and riches they couldn’t win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.

Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela’s negros e indios would lose their king but still stay in the game. Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn’t bet against Hugo Chavez.

“War’ s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good at the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”
–Ray Bradbury, from the short story, The Time Machine, 1957

Sequestration Cuts Will Devastate the National Institutes of Health

I got this from the Scripps Institute.

Supporters of the cuts (Republicans) say that the cuts will effect almost no one, and that we are only cutting things 2% anyway. If programs were only being cut 2%, no one would be complaining!

I know people on Section 8 housing. They are also on Social Security, SSI and Medicaid. There are a lot of White people who use programs like that. A lot! Their rates just went up 15%. Their rent isn’t even really affordable anyway. What most people don’t realize is that most people on Section 8 can’t even afford the measly rent that they have to pay.

And that’s before Sequestration cuts and the Ryan Budget and all of that. It’s obvious that a lot of these folks are not going to be able to survive anymore. They won’t be able to afford their rent anymore, their medical care will be dramatically reduced or eliminated and their social security will be badly cut. A lot of people are going to be hurt, get injured, get sick, go homeless and die. A lot of people are going to die. These cuts are going to kill people. And I cannot support that.

You may have heard that the 2013 budget sequestration will result in deep cuts across many government programs. Among those is the National Institutes of Health, which will lose $1.6 billion that would normally fund research on cancer, aging, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and more.

TSRI Associate Professor Laura Niedernhofer believes her team will one day find a drug to decrease the impact of old age, but her research is now in jeopardy. “This line of research will be stopped… and this is not just my case, there are hundreds of other scientists in the exact same boat.”

Scientists need your support now more than ever to keep their vital research going.

US Deficit Has Been Cut By 50%

Source: Campaign for America’s Future:

Is the deficit bigger, smaller or about the same as last year?

Answer: Smaller. And it’s down 50 percent as a share of GDP since 2009.

What percentage of Americans knows this?

Answer: Six percent, according to a recent Bloomberg poll.

No wonder we are in this mess. A well-funded misinformation campaign has been trying to convince Americans to take drastic action for a problem that does not exist.
A Grand Swindle

Last week, the Republicans set off an austerity bomb that will seriously harm our economy and our people.

They are pressuring the President to sell us down the river by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits in exchange for closing a few tax loopholes.

The Campaign for America’s Future says this isn’t a Grand Bargain; it’s a Grand Swindle. You can’t cut your way to prosperity, and you can’t stand up without a spine. We are driving a coordinated campaign to pressure the President and Congress.

Take action now to fight the Grand Swindle.
Our Plan

1. Tell the truth about the deficit.

We are banging on every door in the media to get this message out.

2. Stop Congress from negotiating from weakness.

Repeal the Sequester. Don’t let them cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. If there are cuts to be made, a manufactured crisis is a terrible way to make them.

The Insane Sequester Cuts

Here.

There really was no reason for any of this nonsense to happen. The deficit has already been cut by 50% since Obama took office and it could easily be cut by much more than that. For one thing, we could get rid of the Bush tax cuts once and for all. That would pretty near solve the budget deficit right there. Those tax cuts, even the middle class ones, are simply unsustainable. As we go into the future, we are going to have to make huge cuts to programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in order to pay for those stupid tax cuts.

Far Right Republican Barack Obama has said over and over that he is 100% down with cutting if not destroying altogether Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It is mystifying why he feels that way, but in the bottom of his black reactionary heart, Obama is a Reaganite, a far rightwing Republican. Ronald Reagan is his political hero. He nearly worships the ground on which Reagan walked. As Reagan desired to destroy our social programs, so of course does Barack Obankster. He is just another capitalist dog like all the capitalist vermin politicians. He also has apparently bought 100% into the lies that our social programs are economically unsupportable and that having social programs in the US is unsupportable and will eventually bankrupt the country. It’s utter nonsense, but Barack the capitalist has swallowed it whole.

Just a few days ago, Barack got up and gave a speech bragging about how much he has cut out of our great and necessary government programs. He was bragging to the Republicans about this! Who is this guy? Is he trying to out Republican the Republicans?

Over and over, Barack has tried to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He is absolutely determined, like a bulldog, to cut these programs! His party has stopped him over and over, but he just comes right back in a year or so and proposes or even demands it again. He’s dead set on gutting these programs, and he has been from the day he walked into office. In fact, he campaigned on this very issue. Total War on the Poor is an issue that Barack feels very deeply about it, the blackest depths of his inky and soiled soul. The guy hasn’t gone over to the enemy; he’s been with them the whole time, but we never even knew it.

Look at this chart. It’s some kind of a sick joke.

Want to send your corporation’s jobs overseas? No problem! If you do that, we will even give you a huge tax cut to reward you for firing Americans and hiring Indians! $583 billion in tax breaks for corporations who choose to do the patriotic thing and fire Americans in order to hire sleazy Mumbai Hindus.

The sequester cuts will raise the eligibility age of Medicare and Medicare beneficiaries will see their premiums rise shortly while their benefits are cut. This is the “Medicare reform” that the diabolical Obama has been screaming about for years now! This is what the sick little worm Barack wants.

The stupid sequester cuts will cost the economy 1 million jobs, many of which are probably never coming back. They may well send the economy into another recession or even depression.

In return for that, a $54 billion tax break to the ultra-rich for refusing to pass the Buffet Rule for an alternative minimum tax rate for millionaires.

70,000 kids thrown off Head Start.

In return, $293 million for not limiting the extra benefit of tax reductions for the top 2% (those making $200-300,000/yr).

10′s of millions of Americans will their Social Security checks cut in the future as they do not keep pace with inflation.

In return, $21 billion for a tax loophole for Wall Street hedge fund manager and leveraged buyout specialists.

500,000 low income people with HIV/AIDS will lose access to their medication they need to stay alive. How many will die?

In return, $149 billion in offshore tax havens for slimy corporate scum like Microsoft, Apple, and (don’t be evil LOL!) Google.

4 million fewer meals delivered via Meals on Wheels to our poor seniors. I don’t understand this program well. What is it all about?

In return, $3 billion tax loophole for Wall Street derivatives traders.

This is nothing but Class War. Why do Americans always support the rich in Class War? I will never understand this.