We Get Letters, We Get Letters-- Or At Least We Used To... Before Trump Hired Louis DeJoy To Destroy The Post Office

Louis & Donald Fix The Post Office by Nancy Ohanian

I'm absolutely positive that Trump gave DeJoy a blanket pardon before DeJoy went for work for him. Either that or DeJoy is plum loco. On Tuesday DeJoy issued a disingenuous official statement on his disenfranchisement shenanigans, acknowledging that the postal service which he has been systematically disrupting, "will play a critical role this year in delivering election mail for millions of voters across the country... I want to assure all Americans of the following:

• Retail hours at Post Offices will not change.
• Mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain where they are.
• No mail processing facilities will be closed.
• And we reassert that overtime has, and will continue to be, approved as needed.

When he said "mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain where they are," he meant in the land-fills they've already been dumped in.

And when he said "overtime has, and will continue to be, approved as needed," he meant by his own lackeys who are have basically two jobs:

• Destroy public trust in the post office so it can be sold off and privatized.
• Disenfranchise Democratic voters to help Trump steal the election.

Not part of the public statement, though, was the order he gave not to reconnect and mail sorting machines and not to reinstall any blue boxes he had ordered removed. This was a memo from one of DeJoy's stooges, Kevin Couch the national director of Maintenance Operations:

Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight.

They are not to reconnect / reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager," wrote Kevin Couch, Director of Maintenance Operations. "Please have them flow that request through you then on to me for a direction."

A follow up e-mail to every regional maintenance manager read: "We are not to reconnect any machines that have previously been disconnected." This was (in part), Pelosi's statement after she met with DeJoy on Wednesday: "The Postmaster General’s alleged pause is wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked.  The Postmaster General frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works.  All of these changes directly jeopardize the election and disproportionately threaten to disenfranchise voters in communities of color.  At the same time, we are highly concerned that the slowdown of the delivery of medicines to veterans is not being sufficiently addressed."

90 Members of Congress-- all Democrats-- sent the 6 members of the Postal Service's board of governors a letter calling for the dismissal of DeJoy, also on Wednesday. "We write to urge you to immediately remove Postmaster General Louis DeJoy," they began, "using your powers under 39 U.S. Code § 202. Mr. DeJoy has used his time as Postmaster General to sabotage the United States Postal Service (USPS) and he must be removed immediately to protect this critical institution. Despite recent claims by Mr. DeJoy that implementation of certain changes may be delayed, he has already done considerable damage to the institution and we believe his conflicts of interest are insurmountable.

And that brings us to a worrying assertion by top investigative journalist Greg Palast that voting by mail with DeJoy running the post office "is playing Russian Roulette with your vote." He recommends that "since voting in-person on Election Day can kill you, to avoid the pitfalls of vote by mail, get your absentee ballot from your local county Board of Elections and return it there. Or, use drop boxes in states that have them. Otherwise, ask for your ballot at least 8 weeks before the election. In most states, you can take the mail-in ballot to an early polling station-- and safely drop it off."

Palast told radio host Mike Papantonio that an MIT study found that even pre-Trump 22% of all vote by mail ballots don't get counted. One in 10 people who ask for absentee ballots never get them and one in 5 mailed-in ballots get junked. When Papantonio asked him "How safe is vote by mail," he responded that it isn't. "you can have all these jerks in Hawaiian shirts, the Boogaloo Boys, the Proud Boys, they're going to go in… Trump’s calling for 50,000 volunteers. It's not an intimidation army. People have that wrong. The real danger’s that are going to go in and say, I don't like that signature on that ballot. That ballot was taped shut instead of a sealed shut by licking the envelope. I'm not kidding. And if you think it's just Republicans who do that, in New York this past last week the Democratic Party challenged the counting of 28,000 mail-in ballots-- the Democratic Party. Once they established that precedent, how many ballots do you think Trump's people will challenge? How many millions I should say. So it's not safe to mail in your ballot."

He reminded his listeners that the Democratic Party in California shafted Bernie out of 553,000 votes in the March primary. "That's what the Democratic Party did. But nationwide, what you have is a mass wipe out of voters by the Republicans. We've had a big purge of the voter list. 16.7 million people, according to the federal government, have been erased from the voter rolls. They're going to have a tough time getting their mail-in ballots if you're not on the voter rolls. And the Republicans have learned from the Democrats in New York and the Democrats in California and throughout the nation they're going to be challenging every single mail-in ballot that comes in."

20 Ways Vote By Mail Could Revolutionize Our Democracy And Save Our Nation-- if Election Protection Activists Make It Happen

-by Harvey Wasserman

Vote by Mail will decide the 2020 election. Trump and 50,000 of his armed backers will try to say otherwise.

But VBM could turn us forever from hackable touch screens to paper ballots. To make that happen, election protection activists must overcome Vote by Mail’s many vulnerabilities to make mail-in paper ballots an instrument of real democracy.

The odds are long, but the chances are real.

To follow an ongoing compendium of stories on this election as they unfold, go to the Election Protection portal at the Free Press website. You can also join our national COVID-19 Emergency Zoom call on election protection this Tuesday 5:00-6:30 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00-3:30 Pacific Time) by writing to me via www.solartopia.org.

In the Big Picture, Trump loudly hates VBM. But his followers LOVE it in states they control.

They fear Vote by Mail in swing states because it might deliver actual ballots to the Millennials and minorities who’ll decide this election, and it might actually lead to them being fairly counted.

US senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have proposed a bill to support VBM nationwide. It includes key funding and deadline provisions that are essential to its proper use.

But Trump’s Republicans have already pledged $20 million to hire 50,000 “volunteers” to “patrol” the polls this fall. Many are likely to be carrying guns. Their mission will be to intimidate and assault “suspicious” or “fraudulent” voters, i.e. citizens of youth, color, and limited means.





To neutralize them, a half-million democracy activists must come out before, during, and after election day. They must be “armed” with a firm grip on voting with VBM’s many challenges in each individual state and county. (Our weekly Zooms-- upcoming on Tuesday-- discuss this in great detail.)

The election protectors must be prepared to stand across from these intimidators at the polls and make voters feel safe and protected. They must safeguard paper ballots arriving in the mail, make sure they are safely stored, and guarantee that they’re fairly counted.

Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawai have long voted by mail. So will California this fall. (Trump has complained that with VBM “no Republican in this country will ever win another election,” but a California Republican Congressional candidate just did.)

All states have long provided absentee ballots. But this fall most will be severely stretched to handle massively increased VBM volume, and to deal with a system being used on this scale for the first time in their history.

Anyone committed to a fair 2020 election must consider immediately joining local election boards, becoming a poll worker and/or a vote counter, etc. Above all, they must know every detail of how voting will proceed in every state and county.

Here is some of what the election protection movement must overcome in just five months:

1. Printing and Publishing

Paper VBM ballots must first be designed, printed, and published. Ballots can be extremely complex, especially where referenda are involved. Accidental typos and deliberate manipulations are common.

The infamous “butterfly ballots” printed in south Florida in 2000 induced thousands of elderly voters to choose Pat Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore. Absentee ballots mailed to voters in southwestern Ohio in 2004 omitted the name of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Democratic primary ballots in California 2016 and 2020 omitted Bernie Sanders, costing him more than a half-million votes, according to Greg Palast.

Legitimate complications can arise when candidates drop out, with other technicalities as deadlines approach, or with simple incompetence or overwork.

Election protection activists must proofread all ballots BEFORE they go to the printing houses.

They must also guarantee that enough paper ballots are printed to enfranchise all voters slated to receive them by mail, and to be available at voting stations for all new registrants and for other unforeseen challenges.

Hackable touchscreens must NOT be allowed to swing this election on the excuse that enough paper ballots are not available.

Computerized machines that may be needed to print out ballots in multiple languages at polling stations require heavy independent scrutiny and mechanical maintenance.

Ink specifications must verified so ballots will be readable in electronic imaging machines. Barcoded ballots can be especially susceptible to disarray from the use of inferior printing materials.

Once printed, the ballots must be carefully protected during delivery from the print houses to the election boards, and then be safely stored, with clear chain of custody.

2. Protecting the Voter Registration Rolls

Researcher Greg Palast estimates some 17 million Americans have been stripped from the voter rolls based on age, race and class. Andrea Miller’s People Demanding Action is among those working on this. Stripping the voter rolls has become a huge potential pitfall in the coming election, and will be discussed in detail in a future report.

3. Who Gets a Ballot & How?

The most democratic VBM procedure is for the state and county election boards to simply send ballots to all registered voters.

But in Ohio and elsewhere, partisan legislators, secretaries of state, governors, etc. have contrived to first send a postcard ... then (maybe) an application ... then (maybe) a ballot. All must meet firm deadlines.

Such flimsy, complex, time-consuming procedures add to the risk of document(s) being lost in the mail, ignored at home, trashed at the election board, etc. Where inner city voters are involved, that seems in many cases to be the partisan purpose.

This multi-layered process can mean many citizens get no ballot, or get them too late to mail back in time to be accepted and counted.

All democracy activists in all states and counties need thorough knowledge of these procedures. Their ability to monitor and act on them could decide the fall election’s outcome.

4. The Military, Diplomats, and Other Overseas Americans

The US military votes by mail, or electronically. There are always widespread reports that some officers may illegally intimidate soldiers into voting a certain way. Deadlines and counting procedures can be problematic.

Former diplomat Jennifer Roberts says others voting from afar include overseas workers with the US Commercial Service, USDA, USIA, AID, and more; corporate executives and contractors working overseas with international companies; students studying abroad; teachers. Hundreds of thousands of ballots can be involved. Unless protected, these votes can be lost, stolen or manipulated.

5. Will Return Applications & Ballots Be Pre-stamped or Mass Harvested?

Mailed-in applications and ballots require pre-paid envelopes. To do otherwise is to levy a poll tax. Democracy advocates must guarantee voters get a stamp for mailing in their ballots, or help in hand-delivering them to VBM boxes or the election boards themselves.

But “ballot-harvesting” (i.e. the mass gathering of ballots) has already been linked to criminal fraud in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Gray areas include “ballot parties” in elder/nursing homes conducted by partisan activists, where witnessing and/or notarizing can be accomplished.

Overall, the complex and often corrupted ways ways VBM ballots go to voters and back to election boards and voting stations demands extreme vigilance from those who would protect the franchise.

6. Will There Be a Postal Service?

Technically, if the US Postal Service is gone or compromised, ballots could go both ways with UPS, FedEx, or other private services. But prices would certainly be affected.

Nor do UPS & FedEx deliver first-class mail to rural areas. Many Indigenous, impoverished and homeless have P.O. boxes, not street addresses. FedEx/UPS would be unlikely to handle them, or senior centers, or those in prison, or students on campus, etc.

Post Office box addresses are also problematic for voter registration where election boards require a street address.

In sum: a destroyed/undermined USPS will pose huge challenges to a fair VBM election.

7. Where Will the Ballots Go, and When?

VBM ballots mostly need to be returned to election boards, whose offices can be few and far between. Some may offer special drop boxes, which will require special security to keep them from being stolen and/or destroyed.

Ohio’s 2020 primary featured a single election center per each of the state’s 88 counties. The one in Franklin County (population: 1.5 million) was in an abandoned Kohl’s department store in a remote corner of Columbus. There were no drop boxes. Long lines (mostly in cars) built up through election day with voters trying to drop off their ballot or to obtain one. (Rural counties had no such problems.)

To properly serve the voting public, election centers must open at least two weeks before the election. Plentiful, secure drop boxes must be well-advertised and easy to find for a fair VBM outcome.

8. Chain of Custody

Convenient, decentralized voting centers should be universally available two or three weeks prior to election day. But those ballots demand serious protection.

Chain of control must be clearly established so ballots in certain key areas don’t wind up in rivers and trash burners.

9. Voting Centers

Most VBM voting goes without face-to-face exposure. But well-advertised and convenient voting centers are still needed.

For two or three weeks prior to election day, at universally known voting centers, citizens should be able to pick up and/or drop off ballots, register, consult with poll workers to straighten out registration issues, etc. Centers should be open and staffed with long hours to avoid long lines that cause deadly back-ups, and to provide services in a timely, accurate, friendly way. If Trump does mobilize thousands of armed thugs, election protection activists must be at the voting centers to meet them.

10. The Surrender Rule

The “surrender rule” requires that voters who do receive their paper ballots in the mail but want to vote at a voter center bring the ballot in with them to use to vote, or to “surrender” for a different kind of ballot.

Those who show up without the ballot that’s been sent to them will almost certainly be forced to vote provisionally, meaning their ballot will likely be pitched in the trash.

11. Election Protection at the Voting Centers

Trump’s hired “volunteers” are likeliest to threaten intimidation and violence at the voting centers. Nonviolent election protection activists must be present in great numbers to neutralize the expected Trump assault.

12. Will Vote by Mail Mean Universal Paper Ballots?

True election protection requires that all voting centers provide paper ballots for hand-marking by those capable of doing so.

Voting machines can serve those with special needs. But hand-markable paper ballots must be available for all those who want them and who don’t want or need to vote on hackable electronic machines.

Especially during this pandemic, touchscreens can spread infection. So election protection activists must be present to guarantee that paper ballots are universally available both by mail and at voting stations to all those who are eligible and capable of casting them.

13. When Will the Ballots Be Mailed Out?

Deadlines for ballot mail-out, postmarking, and/or receipt can vary widely. The courts defeated attempts in Wisconsin’s 2020 primary to extend postmarking deadlines for returned VBM ballots. But many ballots arriving with no postmark were apparently accepted for counting in some precincts, while being rejected in others.

Thus an entire election could be turned by an arbitrary decision by a single county official. A US Supreme Court decision left some 30,000 ballots in play in this spring’s Wisconsin primary.

In many elections over the years, thousands of ballots were never actually sent to voters, or were sent too late to come back on time. Thousands have been stolen after being sent. Thousands more never arrived for various reasons. All this demands extreme scrutiny from election protection activists.

Guaranteeing timely delivery and return of legitimate ballots is at the heart of election protection and the VBM system.

14. When Are the Ballots Due Back?

Deadlines vary from state-to-state and county-to-county for when a ballot must be postmarked and/or received to be counted.

With this year’s expected massive influx of VBM paper ballots (especially in states that haven’t done VBM before, or which are corrupted with partisan legislatures), many state and local deadlines for reception and final tabulation are unrealistic.

In Florida 2000 and 2018, tens of thousands of votes were simply trashed because arbitrary counting and recounting deadlines weren’t met. Such deadlines have had decisive impacts on races for the presidency, governorships, US Senate seats, and more.

Election protection demands litigation to make deadlines for returns and reporting as realistic as possible.

15. Voter ID, Signature Verification, and Witness & Notarization Requirements

Some states have imposed arbitrary photo ID and other requirements that can allow election boards to trash as many ballots as they want, in highly discriminatory ways.

First-time Wisconsin voters must submit a photo ID to get a ballot. In Texas a hunting or gun license gets you a ballot, but a student ID does not. Photo IDs and other screens can be used to thin the voter rolls by race, gender, age, class, etc.

A signature on an electronic device at a motor vehicle bureau or voting station can be a wavy line rendered by a fingernail or a stylus. But a signature on another type of document might be entirely different.

Many states have set demands for notarization, one or two witnesses, etc. In some elder homes, where voters are immobile, signatures from employees and attendants are banned, making getting a witness virtually impossible.

16. Internet Voting, Vote by Phone, and Digital Divide

Voter registration and voting by phone or internet are all being proposed in some states. Theft, manipulation and disappearance are possible side effects. Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 were both significantly turned by electronic manipulation.

Rural, elderly, uneducated, and low-income households can be disenfranchised by their lack of computer/internet capability.

17. Early Counting

In addition to the challenges of safely storing them, early VBM ballots could tempt locals officials to do early counting, and then to leak results (real or imagined) that could affect the remainder of the election. This must not be allowed to happen!

18. Counted How?

Paper ballots must be counted either by hand or machine or both, either as mail-in ballots or when deposited in person at election centers. This year’s volume will be immense. Hand-counts could require days or weeks, especially in a time of social distancing. Sufficient work forces may not be readily available for timely tallies, especially in urban centers.

Electronic ballot image machines can convert inserted paper ballots to electronic images which are then readily readable for a quick vote count. The original ballot itself is preserved for a hard, reliable recount if necessary.

According to John Brakey, such machines are already available in more than 80 percent of the nation’s voting centers.

Many election protection activists worry about these machines being hacked or breaking down, accidentally or otherwise.

If they preserve the actual paper ballots, recounts could be made fair and reliable. But for ballot imaging machines to work, they must be turned on, which many local officials refuse to do.

19. (Re)Counted by When?

Even if ballot imaging is used for a fast initial vote count, recounts using the preserved paper ballots are inevitable. And reporting deadlines which must be met to validate the (re)counts vary widely.

In southern Florida 2000, the US Supreme Court infamously stopped the process in urban areas, making George W. Bush president. In Ohio 2004, the legally-mandated recount never happened. US Senate and governor’s races in Florida 2018 were decided when dense southern counties couldn’t meet recount deadlines.

In 2020, election protection activists must guarantee that thorough, reliable recounts happen in a timely manner.

20. The Six, Twelve or Eighteen Swing States

There is widespread speculation on which key swing states will make the definitive difference in the final 2020 Electoral College vote count. National Popular Vote says it could all boil down to Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Other swing states in play may include Minnesota, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada and Iowa. Given Trump’s volatility and the instability of our national scene, even Georgia, Texas, Kansas, Montana, Kentucky, and West Virginia could become critical.

In all of them, how the ballots are mailed out, brought back in and counted will be key.

Five months remain to produce a workable VBM infrastructure with reliable standards and procedures, created in many states this year virtually from scratch.

Mundane stuff like warehousing, security, registration checking, tabling, ballot collection, counting, and other details could decide the fate of the Earth.

VBM’s challenges are daunting, but reasonably clear. They’ll turn on the strength of grassroots election protection organizations in each key state, and how quickly they can get up and running.

Just weeks ago, few could see how thoroughly COVID-19 would demand the birth of a nationwide Vote by Mail system.

But its effective implementation and protection-- state by state, county by county-- will depend on an unprecedented national grassroots movement dedicated to a fair outcome for the 2020 election. That movement has just five months to produce a system, mostly based on Vote by Mail, that will reasonably reflect the will of the People.

And it will apparently have to be done in the face of intense, well-paid opposition, much it heavily armed.

Voter Registration, The Democrats' Sleeping Giant

-by Alice Marshall

In 1980 The AFL-CIO's Committee On Political Education hired me to run a voter education project in Virginia's 4th Congressional District. I made my headquarters in Franklin, Virginia, a paper mill town 40 miles west of Norfolk Virginia. My job was to contact union members who were not registered to vote and persuade them to register as well as contact members who were registered to vote and persuade them to vote for the candidates the union had endorsed.

I was given two computer print-outs of union members, one of union members who were registered to vote and a second, and far larger list, of members who were not registered to vote. Again, my job was to persuade unregistered members to register to vote, and persuade both groups to vote for the union endorsed candidates. So I went about contacting members at the factory gate, by phone, and by mail. In Franklin I went to each shift change at the paper mill, 6 AM, 3 PM, and 11 PM, and distributed fliers urging workers to register and giving the times and places that they could register. I made sure that everyone knew that the registrar kept evening hours on Wednesday evenings. In those days there was no mail-in registration, that was put in by Bill Clinton. So if you could not get to the registrar during regular office hours, there was only one evening you could go to register. Wednesday is prayer night in the South, every church, black and white, has their prayer meetings, choir rehearsal, bible study, and so on, on Wednesday evenings. So by offering extended hours only on Wednesday evenings, the local establishment could effectively disenfranchise workers. Unless, of course, someone like me came to town and asked every worker to register to vote.

The local registrar told me that 1980 had seen the largest increase of voters of any election in her career. In 1976 Franklin had gone for Gerald Ford. In 1980 Franklin voted for Jimmy Carter. I suspect that it was one of the only jurisdictions in the country that flipped from Republican to Democratic in 1980. That experience taught me the power of voter registration. I don't think we could have saved the country from Reagan merely by voter registration. But there is no doubt that Democrats have lost many elections by failing to incorporate voter registration into their campaign strategy.

I am told that it isn't worth the effort to mobilize marginal voters, that it is too expensive. But Republicans don't think so. Republicans spend millions of dollars on voter suppression. For some reason Democrats have never drawn the obvious conclusion, that they can win elections by pushing back against voter suppression. Somehow Democrats think they can win elections even when much of their base stays home.

When I became Chair of the Voter Registration for the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, I knew that I could dramatically increase the Democratic vote merely by targeted voter registration efforts. By 1998 Bill Clinton had changed the law so that every state had mail-in voter registration. This meant that it was no longer necessary to create satellite registration sites, it was no longer necessary to persuade voters to go to the registrar's office. Now all you had to do is to get boxes of voter registration applications from the registrar's office, print up a flier asking people to register to vote, and distribute them. And so, this is precisely what I set about to do. Carefully examining precinct returns to identify those areas with Democratic vote of 60% or better, I identified low rent garden apartments all over Fairfax County for my campaign.

At first I went out by myself; no one on the committee understood what I was doing. But after I was able to report that indeed, voter registration applications were trickling into the registrar's office, committee members began to volunteer. After a few months I had a regular group who could be depended upon to go out, even in the hottest weather, and distribute fliers and forms in every low rent garden apartment complex in the county.

It was difficult to persevere. I remember a very hot Saturday in July distributing forms in the Vista Gardens apartment complex. My volunteers distributed forms to each of the 1200 apartments. Of these, only 11 were mailed in, a return of less than 1%. Furthermore there is an excellent chance that 3 of these new voters were Republicans. Virginia does not register by party, so this is only a guess. But if the guess is correct we registered a net gain of 5 Democratic votes. However, when you consider that Jack Kennedy won the 1960 election by an average of less than one vote per precinct, you realize that 5 new voters per precinct is a significant gain. Moreover, there were several large apartment complexes in that precinct and we worked all of them. And yes, each weekend saw a return of less than 1%. But altogether we added something like 60 new voters in that precinct that year, and almost certainly at least 50 of them Democrats, for a net gain of 40 votes. 40 additional Democratic votes in a single precinct is a major gain. Furthermore, all the voter registration activity in that precinct had the effect of mobilizing those people who were already registered to vote. The Democratic vote in that precinct increased by an additional 10 points, one of our best gains. Only some precincts offer the opportunity for this sort of gain. But it breaks my heart that local Democratic committees are walking away from these opportunities.

In his great documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Greg Palast observes that before they take away your job, your pension, your house, first they must take away your vote. If progressives are to protect jobs, collective bargaining, pensions, and the rest, first progressives must defend voting rights. If you are not doing voter registration and voter protection, can you really say you are a progressive?



The cumulative impact of my voter registration work in Fairfax over successive years helped shift the entire county. In 1999 Democrats won a State Senate race, school board race, and Board of Supervisor's race based on the increase of the Democratic margin in Democratic precincts. There can be no doubt that we could shift the whole country with such efforts.

This post is addressed to members of local party committees, precinct captains. Candidates and campaign managers will not understand this. Candidates and campaign managers are interested in winning their election. They are focused only on the campaign season at hand. They are not interested in cultivating the Democratic vote in a single precinct over time.

Most of the Democratic politicians in Fairfax County did not understand or support my work. Gerry Connolly was one of the few who understood my work and supported it. I know that he is not popular with progressives. But there are reasons that he remains popular with Democratic activists in his district.

If you live in Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, or any state which has elections this year, I encourage you to start planning a voter registration effort now. People will tell you that you will not get a good return in an off-year election. Yet  it is precisely in low turnout years that voter registration can play a crucial role in victory. It is true that you will not get anything like the response you would get in a presidential year. But in a low turnout election, 40 additional votes in a Democratic precinct is the difference between winning and losing. For more information about voter registration, voter protection, and pushing back against voter suppression read my book: The Precinct Captain's Guide To Political Victory.

Will Paul Ryan And The GOP Be Slowed Down Watching Greece's Agony With The Same Austerity Agenda They're Ramming Through Congress?

The drachma was good enough for Plato

Last May, in a Times column called Eurodämmerung, Paul Krugman predicted that the Greece's exit from the Eurozone was not just nigh but that it would lead teethe dissolution of the whole project. A few weeks earlier he had laid out the reasons he was becoming more and more convinced that it was just a matter of time for Greece to leave the Eurozone.

Even with a debt restructuring, Greece will be in deep trouble, forced to engage in severe austerity-- and provoke a deep slump-- just to close the primary, non-interest deficit.

The only thing that could reduce that need for austerity would be something that helped the economy expand, or at least not contract as much. This would reduce the economic pain; it would also increase revenues, reducing the needed amount of fiscal austerity.

But the only route to economic expansion is higher exports-- which can only be achieved if Greek costs and prices fall sharply relative to the rest of Europe.

If Greece were a highly cohesive society with collective wage-setting, a sort of Aegean Austria, it might be possible to do this via a collectively agreed reduction in wages across the board-- an “internal devaluation.” But as today’s grim events show, it isn’t.

The alternative is a devaluation-- which means leaving the euro.

Any announcement of plans to leave the euro would, as Eichengreen points out, trigger disastrous bank runs. By the same token, any suggestion by outside players, like the ECB, that the option exists would amount to invoking a speculative attack on Greek banks, and therefore can’t be made. The whole thing is effectively undiscussable.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Greece is already starting to look like Argentina 2001.

Der Spiegel is reporting this week that German conservatives Angela Merkel (Chancellor) and Wolfgang Schäuble (Finance Minister) are threatening to expel Greece from the euro zone if it does not stick to the austerity dictates of the "troika" (the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank)-- in other words, if progressive Alexis Tsipras and his SYRIZA party win the January 25 elections-- as looks likely. Johannes Stern:

The threat from Merkel and Schäuble underscores the antidemocratic character of the EU and the German bourgeoisie. The Greek people not only have no right to determine policy in their own country, they are to be punished if they vote for a party critical of austerity policies dictated by German imperialism.

Berlin’s aggressiveness is an expression not only of the EU’s antisocial policies directed against the working class, but also of the deepening crisis in Europe. Six years after the outbreak of the financial crisis and after years of deep social cuts in southern Europe, the political, economic and social tensions within and between European countries have reached the breaking point.

...From the standpoint of finance capital, the decision has already been made. Greece has to continue to bow to the austerity dictates of Germany and the EU, which have thrown a large section of the Greek population into bitter poverty and gone a long way towards destroying a functioning society.

“There will be no Greece law,” said Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder (Christian Social Union-- CSU), according to Monday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It is clear for me that there will be no debt relief or reduction just because a new government comes to power.”

In Welt am Sonntag, Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary fraction leader Thomas Oppermann warned, “We will insist that the structural reforms in Greece be implemented.”

Social Democratic leader and vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel followed suit, demanding in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung that Athens implement plans for cuts and economic “reforms.” It was expected that “regardless who forms [the next Greek government], agreements reached with the EU will be upheld.” The German government would “not be blackmailed,” he added.

German threats are aimed not so much at preventing SYRIZA from forming a government, as at disciplining the party. The German government intends to compel SYRIZA and Tsipras to accept the debt Memorandum just as unconditionally as had the social democratic PASOK party under then-Prime Minister George Papandreou and the conservative New Democrats under the current Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras.

This week Michael Nevradakis interviewed Greg Palast about how the IMF, Austerity Agenda and Vulture Funds have destroyed Greece's economy and turned the country into a crime scene.

Michael Nevradakis: In light of the upcoming elections, Greece at the present time has unemployment that has surpassed 27 percent, youth unemployment at around 60 percent, hundreds of thousands of Greeks who have migrated abroad, a social state in shambles, and a government in the process of selling off key state industries, public lands and utilities. What is your take on the current economic situation in Greece?

Greg Palast: Well, it's fascinating, because if you read the Western press, Greece is now a "success story." By success meaning you're paying off your creditors; your stock market has recovered and the bond market has recovered somewhat. So as far as most of the press is concerned, everything is fine in Greece. The fact that people are unemployed, that people are still losing their homes and livelihoods, doesn't mean much to the press, because all that matters is the stock market and your creditors.

I've been investigating the causes of Greece's collapse; it's a crime scene; it's not something that was a matter of Greeks living beyond their means or being lazy, olive pit-spewing slackers, as the Germans would have it. In fact, I actually looked it up: The average Greek worker works 400 hours more a year than the average German worker. It's a hard-working nation. In fact, I think Greeks are harder on themselves than even the Germans are. It's a hard-working nation, a successful nation, and what happened was your economy was stolen from you.

Michael Nevradakis: Continuing this narrative of Greece being a so-called success story: After so many years of IMF and troika involvement in Greece, there are many who still maintain that Greece has no other choice but to continue along this path. You've done a lot of investigating into what entities such as the IMF and the World Bank have done elsewhere, in Latin America and in Asia. What has been the impact of IMF involvement and austerity policies in these other regions?

Greg Palast: Well, as my fellow economists Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz have noted, the austerity programs are like medieval bloodletting. If you're sick, they would drain the blood from you, and if you didn't get better, they would say "oh, the problem is that we didn't drain enough blood" and they would bleed you some more. That's how austerity works.

No one has yet beaten Keynes' formula, which is that when there's no demand for products, your economy is going to fall apart. Rebuilding demand is the opposite of austerity. This is when you need to borrow; this is when you need to go into deficit. This is when you need to devalue your currency so you can once again export. But you are chained like a prison sentence to the Deutsche mark, which is called the euro right now. You are forced to accept Germany's currency, which makes Greece and its economy overpriced.

So the way that your economy is balanced is by reducing wages rather than by reducing the value of your currency, and that's disastrous in many ways, because it's a death spiral. The fact that money is being sliced out of your gut to pay off bondholders-- to me that is not a sign of health, that is not a sign of recovery: that's a sign of jackals and vultures chewing at the national economic corpse.

...Argentina was tied to the dollar. Right now they're going through another fight with international financial vultures, and they're holding strong, and their economy has not only recovered, but they've roared ahead like a rocket, with high employment, and huge increases in national wealth and huge increases in salary in the past decade and a half while they were resisting the IMF diktats. So that's the path for Greece, I mean: Follow Brazil; follow Argentina; follow Ecuador. They did it, they said no. You can't beg your way out of this problem.

Michael Nevradakis: Sticking with what you've just said about Argentina in particular, you've done extensive investigative reporting on the activities of so-called vulture funds and how they have targeted countries such as Greece or such as those in Latin America or Africa. One individual in particular, Paul Singer, has been at the heart of your investigations, and is tied both to Greece and to Argentina. Who is Paul Singer and what does he have to do with the cases of these two countries?

Greg Palast: Well, if you read my book Vulture's Picnic, which should be coming out in Greek quite soon, these vulture funds-- and I didn't give them the name vulture funds, that's what they called themselves for many years-- they buy up debts of nations when there's a crisis like in Greece, when you can buy up the debts at pennies at the dollar, at a fraction of their face value, and then after a deal has been worked out with everyone else, they are the final holdouts and they demand, in the case of Greece for example, you had creditors who accepted a large cut in the principal of the bonds; the bonds were revalued downward, interest rates were cut-- Singer and one of his associates were the holdouts, and they not only didn't take a loss on their bonds, they were paid multiples and earned something in the area of 200 to 300 percent profit on their bonds. The Greek government made exceptions and paid them additional money.

What they do is they hold your nation ransom. They're doing the same thing in Argentina, but Argentina has said, the president of Argentina Christina Fernandez Kirchner, said "I do not pay ransom, I will not pay vultures." And they are simply refusing to pay these creditors. They're simply not going to pay ransom. Other nations have fought these vultures, and in fact, their activities. The people who have been attacking Greece like Paul Singer, the vulture, his activities have been outlawed in, for example, the British Commonwealth . . . England, Canada, and throughout the British Commonwealth. These are rogue financiers, their activities are banned and are criminal or quasi-criminal in some parts of the world, but these are the people who are dictating to your economics ministers.

Michael Nevradakis: Sticking on the topic of Paul Singer and his activities, there have been certain very notable cases, such as the examples of Peru and also the Congo, where he basically shook these countries down for large amounts of money . . .

Greg Palast: Right. I did a story for BBC television . . . If you go to my website, gregpalast.com, you can see my reports from the Congo. Paul Singer effectively grabbed the money that was set aside to fight a cholera epidemic in the Republic of the Congo. These are not nice guys. Other creditors, the treasuries of the United States or Europe, are used to help bail out countries that are in trouble, whether it's Greece or the Congo or Peru, and after the taxpayers of the US and Europe put up funds to help nations recover, Paul "The Vulture" Singer and his vulture fund friends - remember, they called themselves vultures until recently; they are proud of it - they swoop down, and they say, "Well, now that you've been given money by Europeans and Americans, now we're going to take your resources." And they have seized oil shipments on the high seas; they've seized metal resources, they're basically quasi-illegal pirates, and in fact, they actually seized a pirate ship, no kidding, one old, masted pirate ship they seized from the Argentine Navy, but Argentina got it back.

Michael Nevradakis: How has the Argentine government responded to the recent court decision that came out of the United States which led to the country's "default," and to the continued demands and pressure from Paul Singer?

Greg Palast: What's happened is that the Argentine government, because it told the IMF to go to hell and it told its creditors to go to hell back in the year 2000-2001, under the current president's husband . . . that allowed Argentina time to recover. And in return, while Argentina, 15 years ago, defaulted on its bonds deliberately, it did say that "we will pay back this money eventually, but only when we recover." And in effect, banks were given stock in the economy of Argentina. As the economy grew, they were paid off. So Argentina actually ended up paying the banks $165 billion, but then Singer said, "I don't want what everyone else has," because that would give him only a 300 percent profit. Instead, he's demanded a 3,000 percent profit on the old bonds he holds. And he found some crazy, 84-year old judge in the United States to not only order Argentina to pay him, but ordered Argentina to stop paying its other creditors, banks such as the United Bank of Switzerland, Citibank, the Bank of New York. George Soros was one of the bankers that was being paid by Argentina and had accepted its terms. So literally, a judge ordered Argentina to stop paying its creditors, and therefore, technically the nation has gone into default. Yet still, Argentina said "that's too bad, we'd rather be in default than pay ransom to vultures . . . we'd rather be in default than let our people starve or allow these pirates to seize our economy."

Once again, part of the way that they recovered was by getting rid of the US dollar as their currency, just as, at the moment, Greece is tied to the German currency, and that's just insane. People in Greece are so used to having the euro, they're told that the sky will fall if you step out of the euro. Well the sky has already fallen on Greece. You can't do worse. And if you had your own currency, if you freed yourself from the bondage of German currency, you would be able to begin to restore your economy. And then you could declare that you would pay your creditors in your own currency. The drachma was good enough for Plato, I'm sure it's good enough for you today.

Washington, DC Needs Women... But Not Women Like Penny Pritzker

This week, EMILY'S List launched a program, Madam President, to elect a woman president. The idea is GREAT. America is overdue and really needs a woman president. EMILY'S List, though, is the wrong organization to lead the effort, not much better than if the GOP launched the effort to push Michele Bachmann, Virginia Foxx or Kelly Ayotte. We've seen many times before that EMILY'S List's modus operandi is to viciously and baselessly attack progressive men with sterling records on women's issues, in order to push forward their own hackish candidates-- like Nikki Tinker-- who happen to be females, regardless of the damage those candidates' conservative agendas are likely to cause. What America needs is a strong, progressive woman president.

That's also what America needs in the House, the Senate, in state legislatures, in the Cabinet and across government. I was surprised-- though why I don't know-- to read this morning that although women are 51% of the nation, they make up just 8% of House Republicans. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side, which isn't something to be that proud of either.) And only 20% of the current senators are women. Obama's nominated 15 of his 16 Cabinet members-- and just 4 are women, Kathleen Sibelius, Janet Napolitano, Sally Jewell and now Penny Pritzker.

And that fact that she's a woman shouldn't make Pritzker any more palatable for a progressive. That's really scraping the bottom on the barrel and I'd love to see the Republican obstructionists in the Senate do soemthing worthwhile with their filibuster regime for a change. Pritzker is a real Greg Palast nightmare. "You made fun of me," he wrote, "when I suggested that President Barack Obama would nominate a confessed bank scammer, a loan-sharking mortgage predator, to his cabinet. But thar she blows! Today, Obama has named Penny Pritzker Secretary of Commerce. As the President says, It's a milestone: the first female fraudster to hold that post. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration-- because now they'll have one of their own in the Cabinet. Obama goes way back with Pritzker in Chicago Democratic politics.

Pritzker's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust-- at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.

Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped someone would change the banking regulators and the Commerce Department so she could get away with this crap.

Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator, to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better-- an introduction to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former chairman of Goldman Sachs and former co-chairman of Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.

Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.

So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the banksters loads of lucre.

...In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed the door on Penny pronto.

The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE, the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress on the down-low.

Obama appeared to keep the door shut on Pritzker throughout the 2012 campaign, reducing her to hosting an election fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time and last time anyone used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.

But today, with the unions' money and votes already pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.

The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms. Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.

By giving Penny, the Piggy Banker, Commerce, we have to change Obama's rating to sub-prime. I do note that some woman's organizations are applauding the appointment of the first female to the Commerce post.  But I prefer to honor the victims of the Chicago femme fatale. Most of Penny's victims, busted bank borrowers and underpaid health care workers, are women, too. But, unlike those wounded and destroyed by Pritzker, she worked hard for her money: it was not easy inheriting her first billion from her daddy.

Obama mislead the public when he introduced this sack of crap to the public. “Penny is one of our country’s most distinguished business leaders. She’s got more than 25 years of management experience in industries including real estate, finance and hospitality. She’s built companies from the ground up.” He left out the part about her being vehemently anti-union, both on the Chicago School Board and on the board of Hyatt. And he neglected to mention that FDIC action against her bank and her role in pioneering the re-packaging of subprime loans.

We want more women in government-- but not women like Michele Bachmann and not women like Penny Pritzker. And, by the way, when will ordinary working women-- rather than multimillionairesses and billionairesses-- get some representation. They sure need some-- on every level. But, of course, EMILY'S List has no interest in working class women either.

Mitt Romney-- A Car Guy?

Mitt Romney blurted out a fatuous statement a few weeks ago about being "a car guy." Well... his father was. And owns lots of them (cars, not guys)-- and even an elevator for some-- but the closest he is to being a car guy is that he kind of resembles a used car salesman-- in the worst sense of the term. The most recent polling in Michigan shows him losing, 52-46%. That's not unexpected. But the polls have also shown Obama consistently ahead in Ohio-- and Romney has always known that that would be a death knell for his campaign. Tuesday they either steal Ohio or they have zero chance to win. And a lot of the explanation for why Ohio voters haven't bought into Romney has to do with cars. "Let Detroit go bankrupt," Romney's OpEd in the NY Times on November 18, 2008 plays badly in a state where so many jobs depend on the auto industry. That editorial is killing Romney's chances. and so are a slew of newspaper editorials reminding Ohio voters of it-- and of Romney's dishonest attempts to flip flop around the issue. Let's start with the editorial from the Akron Beacon yesterday, False Facts. It cuts Romney's credibility to shreds and shows why Ohio voters see him as a slimy, untrustworthy used care salesman:

The television ad launched by the Romney campaign this week about the auto rescue is accurate-- at least technically. President Obama did take General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy. Fiat did buy Chrysler, and Chrysler does plan to build Jeeps in China. Missing is the helpful context, the component that exposes just how misleading the Romney campaign has been in the way it has chosen to arrange its three facts.

That context has been provided in recent days by media fact-checkers, editorial pages, even executives at GM and Chrysler. Worth emphasizing is that Romney himself (at other turns in the race) has embraced the bankruptcy route, arguing it was his idea in the first place. In early 2009, the Obama White House weighed whether even to rescue Chrysler, its finances in such deep trouble. The conclusion was: Let’s proceed-- if favorable terms can be reached to make a sale to Fiat.

Chrysler will build in China, reflecting, if anything, the company gaining strength in the wake of the rescue, and more, a global firm doing the logical thing, building in markets where it sells. As the company stressed, that will not affect American operations, including Jeep production here, which has nearly tripled since the rescue.

The past three years, Chrysler has added more than 11,000 American jobs. General Motors reports that it has “brought nearly 19,000 back to work.” Remember, the Center for Automotive Research projected in November 2008 the loss of nearly 2.5 million jobs, many in Ohio, if one or more of the American automakers failed.

And that was a real prospect, GM and Chrysler running out of money, unable to secure private financing to keep operating in bankruptcy. Then, the Obama White House stepped up, the money coming as long as the automakers developed a credible plan for restructuring.

The barrage of criticism hardly caused the Romney team to flinch. It upped the ante with a radio ad suggesting the auto rescue helped China at the expense of auto workers here. The argument is as lame as its earlier contention that the bailout was all about favoring the United Auto Workers, a form of “crony capitalism.”

Actually, the auto workers joined others in getting a haircut, losing wages, benefits and job security. An independent trust fund with the job of managing the health benefits of auto worker retirees received a stake in both GM and Chrysler because the companies were broke and couldn’t meet their contractual obligation.

In other words, the trust took a risk. So did the president, and it has paid off for Ohio and other states heavily invested in making autos.

The day before, the Toledo Blade pounded Romney with a double whammy. Their editorial Auto Toxin was lethal: "In the final few days of the presidential contest, Mitt Romney evidently recognizes that his opposition to the federal rescue of General Motors and Chrysler is costing him voter support he needs in Ohio and Michigan. So the Republican nominee is conducting an exercise in deception about auto-industry issues that is remarkable even by the standards of his campaign." The Blade editors go on to explain to their readers that Romney's claims, simply put, rest on a tissue of boldfaced and purposeful lies. A business news story in the same paper the same day nails the point home, with hard facts about how well Jeep is doing in Toledo. (Of course, Romney-owned companies made a habit-- and still are today-- of shipping jobs to China and other low-wage hellholes even when companies were doing well, so Romney and his sleazy plutocratic partners could fatten their already bulging wallets regardless of what it did to working families-- or the American economy.

Chrysler, which owns Jeep and in which the Italian automaker Fiat has a majority stake, quickly denied the report. A company spokesman said Mr. Romney’s rhetorical leap “would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.” But the Romney campaign launched an ad in Ohio that claimed that President Obama, who presided over the auto bailout, “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”

Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne removed all doubt about his company’s intentions this week in an email to employees: “Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China,” he said. “Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand. It is inaccurate to suggest anything different"

He acknowledged that Chrysler intends “to return Jeep production to China, the world’s largest auto market, in order to satisfy local market demand, which would not otherwise be accessible.” The company also wants to avoid heavy import duties. But that’s a long way from Mr. Romney’s insinuation that the automaker is shipping jobs from Toledo to China.

Mr. Marchionne noted that Chrysler is investing $500 million in its Toledo assembly complex and plans to add 1,100 jobs there by next year, largely to build a successor to the Jeep Liberty sport-utility vehicle. He vowed “that the iconic Wrangler nameplate, currently produced in our Toledo, Ohio, plant, will never see full production outside the United States.”

And Romney's been lying about General Motors as well-- the same lies to the same audiences and executives in that company-- who have also tried to stay out of politics-- are steaming mad at the Republicans now. GM, which has hired 4,500 new hourly workers and thousands more new salaried workers at plants across the country since being bailed out by Obama, finally spoke out about Romney's calumny: “At this stage, we're looking at Hubble telescope-length distances between campaign ads and reality.” GM spokesman Greg Martin said. “GM's creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country should be a source of bipartisan pride.”

Turns out, of course, it isn't just auto executives who are angry about Romney's campaign of lies and deception. Greg Palast reported Thursday on how poorly that crap is going over with the UAW. They're going to sue him-- for profiteering from the auto bailout!

For Mitt Romney, it's one scary Halloween. The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout.

At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)  have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney's so-called "blind" trust.

The union chief says, "The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”

“While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys' gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.

...According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen-- who serves as an advisor on the charge-- Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust.  An approved "blind" trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President. Other groups joining the UAW and CREW include Public Citizen, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Public Campaign, People for the American Way and The Social Equity Group.

President Obama's approved trust, for example, contains only highly-diversified mutual funds on which presidential action can have little effect.  By contrast, the auto bail-out provided a windfall of over 4,000% on one single Romney investment. In 2009, Ann Romney partnered with her husband's key donor, billionaire Paul Singer, who secretly bought a controlling interest in Delphi Auto, the former GM auto parts division. Singer's hedge fund, Elliott Management, threatened to cut off GM's supply of steering columns unless GM and the government's TARP auto bailout fund provided Delphi with huge payments. While the US treasury complained this was "extortion," the hedge funds received, ultimately, $12.9 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

As a result, the shares Singer and Romney bought for just 67 cents are today worth over $30, a 4,000% gain.  Singer's hedge fund made a profit of $1.27 billion and the Romney's tens of millions.

The UAW complaint calls for Romney to reveal exactly how much he made off Delphi-- and continues to make. The Singer syndicate, once in control of Delphi, eliminated every single UAW job-- 25,000-- and moved almost all auto parts production to Mexico and China where Delphi now employs 25,000 auto parts workers.

What about President Obama? Are you wondering if he's finally calling Romney on his bullshit. He sure is! He was in Ohio yesterday... and the glovers came off. About time!

[C]hanging the facts when they’re inconvenient to your campaign-– well, that’s definitely not change. But that’s exactly what Governor Romney has been doing these last few weeks. Right here in Ohio, you’ve folks who work at the Jeep plant who have been calling their employers, worried, asking if their jobs were being shipped to China. And the reason they’re been making these calls is because Governor Romney has been running an ad that says so. Except it’s not true. Everyone knows it’s not true. The car companies themselves have told Governor Romney to knock it off. GM said, “we think creating jobs in the United States… should be a source of bipartisan pride.” And I couldn’t agree more.

   And I understand that Governor Romney has had a tough time here in Ohio because he was against saving the auto industry. And it’s hard to run away from that position when you’re on videotape saying the words “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” And I know we’re close to an election but this isn’t a game. These are people’s jobs. These are people’s lives. These car companies are put a lot of effort to make great product but also to make sure everybody in America knows how committed they are to making cars here in America. And so you don’t scare hardworking Americans just to scare up some votes. That’s not what being President is all about. That’s not leadership.

When I first made the decision to rescue the auto industry, I knew it wasn’t popular. Despite the fact that one out of eight jobs in Ohio are connected to the auto industry in someway, it wasn’t even popular in Ohio. But I also knew it was the right thing to do. I knew betting on American workers was the right thing to do. Betting on American ingenuity and know how was right thing to do. That bet paid off. It paid off in Lordstown, where GM is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in their auto plant. It paid off in Toledo, where Chrysler is adding more than 1,000 new jobs on a second shift-- not in China, right here in Ohio. Right here in the United States of America.

When Democrats brought up the auto bailout it passed the then Democratically-controlled House 237-170. All the Republican leaders-- Boehner, Cantor, McCarthy, Sessions-- and many who find themselves in tight electoral battles today-- like Buck McKeon (R-CA), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Ed Royce (R-CA), Todd Akin (R-MO), Steve King (R-IA), Connie Mack (R-FL), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Dan Lungren (R-CA), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), John Kline (R-MN), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC) and Heather Wilson (R-NM)-- voted with Romney against bailing out the auto industry. They were on the wrong side of history. Every one of them should be defeated at the polls Tuesday.

   I think it's almost funny that the 32 Republicans who did the right thing and voted with the Democrats against their own leadership are 100% silent on the issue now. You don't hear Paul Ryan, Fred Upton, Dave Camp, Peter King, Joe Barton, Don Young or Mike Rogers bragging today that they weren't with their sociopathic leadership on this one. They're all laying low-- even though they made the right decision for a change.