By James Thompson

Most working people in the U.S. and around the world achieved a level of euphoria after the election of the first African American to the presidency of the United States in 2008 not experienced in the history of this country. Unfortunately, after the euphoria wore off, working people have descended into apathy and disorganization and assumed a posture not unlike Rip Van Winkle. The sleepy, listless progressive forces have been easy prey for the vast and powerful forces of reaction that poured untold amounts of money into right wing fringe groups such as the Tea Party, Border Watch and their ilk. Extremist right wing candidates are threatening to overwhelm the hapless moderate Democrats in a white backlash not seen since the shameful days of Bull Connor and Barry Goldwater. It should be noted that Bull Connor and Barry Goldwater were defeated by progressive forces and the modern version of these reactionaries can be defeated sooner or later.

It is hard to tell if the Democrats and their allies are about to wake up and realize that the elephant is still in the room. The election of President Obama did not make reaction go away. Clearly, the Obama administration has notched up a few progressive victories in these last two years, a very brief period of time I might add. However, the force of reaction is still strong.

To the dismay of those of us who hoped Obama would end the war and right the wrongs of the Bush administration, we have seen the Bush agenda advanced in a number of ways. The end of the war in Iraq was clearly a fake since there are 50,000 troops left there protecting the advances of imperialism. Obama announced a surge in Afghanistan and the U.S. military continues to provoke Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and others. The threat of war and expanded war has mushroomed in the last two years. All of this has been happening in spite of the fact that polls show that the vast majority of U.S. people oppose the wars and want peace. The vast majority do not want young U.S. working class soldiers to go off around the globe and slaughter working people in other countries. The elephant is still in the room.

The world capitalist economy is circling the drain. High unemployment coupled with an astronomical deficit choke working people and fill them with terror at the thought of mass poverty. The trillion dollars spent on the wars and the bailouts of the banks and ultra-wealthy act like an anvil on our economy which struggles to keep its head above water. The elephant is still in the room.

In spite of mass actions demanding stimulus money be spent on rebuilding our country and job creation as well as universal health care, and education, the corporate media can only present the views of the ultra-wealthy who are fighting with great skill to quash any progressive legislation which might benefit working people. Bills which would benefit working people are routinely killed by the obstructionist Republicans and their conservative Democratic party allies. The elephant is still in the room.

The greatest tragedy of all is that people are unwilling or perhaps unable to see the elephant and formulate a unified plan to address its presence and remove it. Some people say that blind allegiance to the Democrats is the answer. Others condemn the Democrats for not righting all the wrongs. I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Progressive people should unite to fight reaction within the Democratic, the Republican and all other parties. Progressive people should also unite to support progressive sectors of all parties and reach out to the vast majority of the population who do not vote but are quite capable of thinking and seeing through the lies of capitalist propaganda. We will only see change in the interest of working people when progressives form a mass coalition committed to the betterment of this country and the world. Up to now, working people have failed to unite and speak with one voice demanding those things which will move us forward such as peace, equality, justice for all as well as education and health care for all.

The elections are less than two weeks away. Although it is crucial that progressive candidates be elected, this will not be the answer to our problems. A Democratic party sweep of both houses of Congress will not force the change that we need since most politicians are beholden to the corporations and work hard to defend their interests. A Republican party sweep of both houses of Congress will not stop progressive change. Working people must still speak loudly and fight for their interests, no matter what happens.

It is folly to think that progressive Democrats can solve all our problems by themselves. It will take a concerted effort from progressive voting and non-voting working people, unemployed people, the poor, the oppressed, the disabled, ex-prisoners, all gender groups, all racial groups and people of conscience in the religious community to bring about the change that is necessary for the survival of mankind. If we all work together, we can get the elephant out of the room and make progress towards a better world.

PHill1917@comcast.net

Check out this link to an article by Jarvis Tyner http://peoplesworld.org/hope-is-stronger-than-hate/

Check out this video!

Wednesday 08 September 2010
Vivian Weinstein
via morningstaronline.co.uk
A short time ago, US right-wing pundit Glenn Beck started out as a none-too-successful morning DJ with a bare education who hadn’t a thought about politics. He loved to party and was a mean-tempered, self-centred cocaine addict.

He developed a nostalgic vision of the US (that never was) of his grandfather’s day, sitting on a porch rocking chair in a country, “the heartland,” with a relatively small government and about four million white people.

There were no “evil progressives” leaving one to wonder how slavery ended or child labour or who brought about social security or the right of women to vote, among other things.

Beck expresses a strange populist, paranoic, conspiratorial vision of a world divided into “them” and “us.”

Such beliefs, along with delusions of grandeur, righteousness, and self-importance, power and emotional instability have been seen by those who have worked closely with him.

He is well known for using the airwaves to humiliate people personally. He has always had bursts of anger and difficult relationships, needing constant affirmation and attention.

One of Beck’s most infamous incidents was when a friend’s wife was on the phone just after having had a miscarriage and he put her on the open mic and humiliated her.

He moved into the spotlight when regulations were loosened and a few corporations took over most of the radio and TV news and talk channels. He began to talk politics, about which he admitted he knew nothing.

He was getting a growing audience and was rallying for far-right ideology. His humour was always berating the “elite” educated and he was the champion of the ordinary person. His programmes attracted millions of listeners, distrustful of big government while he was protective of big corporations.

When he converted to the Mormon faith, he ended a lifetime of drugs and picked up the “testimonial” tears he is so famous for.

He quickly identified with the most fringe philosophical elements of the Mormon faith in the person of Cleon Skousen. Skousen raged against the intellectual elite, called black children “pickininnies” and the slave-owners “victims.”

Beck made Skousen’s works, which have been called a “joke” by journalist Alexander Zaitchik, required reading for his followers. From oblivion and from the dust heap they are now on the US best-seller list along with Beck’s own books.

Beck cries out: “We need to rescue our constitution and go back to the founders,” despite the fact the constitution was written as a secular document with no religious references.

The constant contradictions matter little in Beck’s books such as Common Sense, a sort of parody on Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet of the same name that helped spark the American revolution.

Beck is thrilled with his following, lack of truth notwithstanding. Beck shouts support for Wall Street, which he calls the “victim.”

Beck tries to isolate the urban poor and black people from the “heartland.” He called Katrina victims “scumbags” and unemployed people “unamerican.”

He sees the corporations involved in the government getting bigger but calls for a world which would leave corporate power free to pollute air, water and land. He would end government regulations protecting worker safety, food and the environment and he denies global warming.

He supports corporations that support him but talks angrily against corporations that supported Obama or that dropped advertising on his programme when he became very offensive and a huge movement was launched against him by liberal public policy advocacy group Moveon.

Beck is making millions leading his movement to “take the government back.”

From whom? The first black US president.

Such racist – although Beck denies that he is racist – paranoid, conspiracy theorists have existed before in times of hardship. Zaitchik feels that the Beck phenomenon is temporary due to “its operatic nostalgia, opiate history, and tin can Orwellian imagination.”

However when Beck sells so much untruth and hate and lies to a largely fringe element that is armed,it cannot be brushed off so easily. His divisive use of people and incitement has not gone unnoticed by Jews and others knowledgeable of the rise of Hitler’s Germany.

By Arthur Shaw

The National Electoral Council of Venezuela (CNE) reported that 6,465 candidates have registered to run in the elections in September, for 165 seats in the National Assembly.

VHeadline commentarist Arthur Shaw writes:

Wow! …6,465 candidates average out to something like 40 candidates per seat.

Does the excess of candidates help revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries?

Will the excess of candidates dilute the revolutionary (PSUV) or the counter-revolutionary (that is, bourgeois-led opposition) vote?

The revolutionary tactic is to run only one candidate for each seat in the hope that the revolutionary sector of the working class will concentrate its votes for this single candidate and thus give the single revolutionary candidate the most votes and the victory. The revolutionaries pray that the counter-revolutionaries will adopt the opposite tactics, that is, the revolutionaries pray the reactionaries will run about 40 candidates for each seat and dilute the counter-revolutionary turn-out over a field of candidates, giving the revolutionaries the victory on a silver platter.

The data doesn’t let us say whether God or some other divine being answered the prayers of the revolutionaries for dilution of the counter-revolutionary vote because the excess of candidates may be interpreted in two ways … either a Venezuelan electoral peculiarity or a dilution.

Some Venezuelans, it seems, like to run for public office … their running has nothing to do with winning or losing. They only want to run. To accommodate these Venezuelans who like to run, Venezuelans organize and register hundreds of political parties so that a candidate can easily find a place on a ticket. Presently, there are about 700 parties … more than enough … registered with National Electoral Counci (CNE).

So, these 6,465 candidates may express this peculiarity of some Venezuelans for running … or … the 6,465 may be dilution.

The bourgeois media in Venezuela and the USA tell us that the opposition made deal for a unified campaign among its 40 parties. The terms of the deal were supposed to be that about 30 of the opposition’s 40 parties would not field candidates at all in order to improve the odds of opposition victory. That the 10 opposition parties that would field candidates would cut up among themselves the 87 electoral districts. And, a party entitled to run candidates would only field candidates in electoral districts assigned to the party.

Given the rumors of this deal for a unified opposition campaign in the bourgeois media, everybody was surprised when the opposition staged a farce called a primary election in April 2010 in which reactionary candidates sought the opposition’s nomination in only 15 of the 87 electoral districts. Only about 300,000 reactionary voters turned out for the opposition primary election. Two weeks later, the PSUV held its May 2010 primary election which attracted 2.6 million voters who nominated candidates in all 87 electoral districts.

So, the question seems to be whether most of the 6,465 candidates, who registered for 165 legislative seats up for grabs in September, are representatives of the opposition or mere expressions of electoral peculiarity that involve a mere love of running for office?

We cannot be sure but it sure seems that the 30 parties in the opposition that agreed not to run candidates are indeed running candidates either in the parties’ name or in the name some front group.

Again, we cannot be sure but it sure seems that the 10 parties entitled to run candidates, under the unified campaign deal, are running candidates in electoral districts assigned to them and, in violation, of the deal, running candidates in districts not assign to the party.

The tactics of the opposition are so confusing. It’s hard to make heads or tails out of them. The bourgeois media aren’t any help in understanding these tactics. Some people believe that not even the opposition understands what the opposition is doing or trying to do.

Let’s step back and try to get an overall picture of the September race.

There are 165 seats in the National Assembly up for grabs. The revolutionaries want to hold on to their two-thirds majority in seats, because a two-third majority is required to amend certain laws called organic laws. So, the revolutionaries got to win, at least, 109 of the 165 seats. The opposition is trying to get, at least, 57 of the 165 seats to prevent a two-thirds revolutionary majority. The 165 seats will be filled like this … 110 seats contested by individuals in 87 electoral districts, 52 seats contested by lists submitted by parties in the various states and 3 seats contested by indigenous candidates before the indigenous sector of the electorate. The counter-revolutionaries are expected to get their seats out the 110-seat group that are individually contested. Revolutionaries are believed to have an edge with 52 candidates chosen by proportional representation and the 3 indigenous candidate. To keep their two-thirds majority, the revolutionaries will have to get a good chunk of the seats in the 52-seat group filled by lists submitted by parties at the state level.

The 110 seats that are individually contested drew 5,245 of the total 6,465 candidates registered with the electoral council.

So, if the 40 parties which compose the opposition are welching on their rumored deal for a unified campaign, then the deal-breakers are part of 5,245 candidates seeking 110 seats available to candidates in their individual capacity.

Will the various counter-revolutionary candidates coordinate their campaigns against the single PSUV candidate or will the counter-revolutionary deal-breakers stab each other in back and spit on each other?

Logic suggests that the counter-revolutionaries are running as much against each other as against the single revolutionary candidate in the race. So, if one of the counter-revolutionaries in the pack pulls away from the pack in name recognition or candidate visibility, the pack is likely to stab him in back or, at least, spit on the frontrunner. The counter-revolutionary candidate who pulls down, tears up, and defaces more campaign materials of his counter-revolutionary opponents is the candidate who is most likely to emerge as the frontrunner in the pack. These were tactics that opposition candidates used in their poorly-attended April 2010 primary elections.

The opposition may be nonchalant about the candidate situation because the opposition isn’t doing candidate-based or driven campaign. The opposition may be doing an issue- or media-based campaign in which the central propaganda line of the bourgeois media is “The economy is breaking down.”

Of course, no “breakdown” is happening or about to happen.

In other words, the campaign isn’t about candidates, rather it’s about the alleged “breakdown.”

If this is what the opposition, the bourgeois media, and US imperialists are up to, then the revolutionaries in proletarian media and so-called “community” media just have show the electorate the many economic successes of the revolution, which the bourgeois media either never mentions or always denies.

Socialism is a transitional combination of capitalist and non-capitalist sectors of the economy. The capitalist sector in Venezuela is being sabotaged by capitalists in the hope of manipulating the September election. But the economy isn’t breaking down.

Indeed, the non-capitalist sector is flourishing.

Inflation in May 2.6% … first five months 14.2%

The Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) and the National Statistics Institute (INE) have released the latest inflation figures. In May, inflation was 2.6%, which comes as a relief to the government after April’s disastrous 5.2% figure.

The total inflation for the first five months stands at 14.2%, which is 5.3 points more than it was for the same period in 2009.

The factors that helped bring down inflation in May were housing services (0.7%), rents (0.9%), clothes and shoes (1.1%), communications (1.2%), educational service (1.4%), health (2.1%), home equipment (2.2%).

Alcoholic beverages and tobacco were up 4.4%, along with transport 3.5%, restaurants and hotels 3.2%, non-alcoholic beverages and food stood at 3.3%.

The government’s readjustment of prices in May contributed to that month’s lower inflation rate.

By Prof. James Galbraith
via MLToday

The following is the text of Professor James K. Galbraith‘s written statement to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered a few days ago. Professor Galbraith teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Readers may be interested to know that he is the son the famed liberal Democrat economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Chairman Specter, Ranking Member Graham, Members of the Subcommittee, as a former member of the congressional staff it is a pleasure to submit this statement for your record.

I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including “rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur. Not all economists believed this – but most did.

Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft- pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble. They continue to do so now. At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word “naughtiness.” This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud.
There are exceptions. A famous 1993 article entitled “Looting: Bankruptcy for Profit,” by George Akerlof and Paul Romer, drew exceptionally on the experience of regulators who understood fraud. The criminologist-economist William K. Black of the University of Missouri-Kansas City is our leading systematic analyst of the relationship between financial crime and financial crisis. Black points out that accounting fraud is a sure thing when you can control the institution engaging in it: “the best way to rob a bank is to own one.” The experience of the Savings and Loan crisis was of businesses taken over for the explicit purpose of stripping them, of bleeding them dry. This was established in court: there were over one thousand felony convictions in the wake of that debacle. Other useful chronicles of modern financial fraud include James Stewart’s Den of Thieves on the Boesky-Milken era and Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, on the Enron scandal. Yet a large gap between this history and formal analysis remains.

Formal analysis tells us that control frauds follow certain patterns. They grow rapidly, reporting high profitability, certified by top accounting firms. They pay exceedingly well. At the same time, they radically lower standards, building new businesses in markets previously considered too risky for honest business. In the financial sector, this takes the form of relaxed – no, gutted – underwriting, combined with the capacity to pass the bad penny to the greater fool. In California in the 1980s, Charles Keating realized that an S&L charter was a “license to steal.” In the 2000s, sub-prime mortgage origination was much the same thing. Given a license to steal, thieves get busy. And because their performance seems so good, they quickly come to dominate their markets; the bad players driving out the good.

The complexity of the mortgage finance sector before the crisis highlights another characteristic marker of fraud. In the system that developed, the original mortgage documents lay buried – where they remain – in the records of the loan originators, many of them since defunct or taken over. Those records, if examined, would reveal the extent of missing documentation, of abusive practices, and of fraud. So far, we have only very limited evidence on this, notably a 2007 Fitch Ratings study of a very small sample of highly-rated RMBS, which found “fraud, abuse or missing documentation in virtually every file.” An efforts a year ago by Representative Doggett to persuade Secretary Geithner to examine and report thoroughly on the extent of fraud in the underlying mortgage records received an epic run-around.

When sub-prime mortgages were bundled and securitized, the ratings agencies failed to examine the underlying loan quality. Instead they substituted statistical models, in order to generate ratings that would make the resulting RMBS acceptable to investors. When one assumes that prices will always rise, it follows that a loan secured by the asset can always be refinanced; therefore the actual condition of the borrower does not matter. That projection is, of course, only as good as the underlying assumption, but in this perversely-designed marketplace those who paid for ratings had no reason to care about the quality of assumptions. Meanwhile, mortgage originators now had a formula for extending loans to the worst borrowers they could find, secure that in this reverse Lake Wobegon no child would be deemed below average even though they all were. Credit quality collapsed because the system was designed for it to collapse.

A third element in the toxic brew was a simulacrum of “insurance,” provided by the market in credit default swaps. These are doomsday instruments in a precise sense: they generate cash-flow for the issuer until the credit event occurs. If the event is large enough, the issuer then fails, at which point the government faces blackmail: it must either step in or the system will collapse. CDS spread the consequences of a housing-price downturn through the entire financial sector, across the globe. They also provided the means to short the market in residential mortgage-backed securities, so that the largest players could turn tail and bet against the instruments they had previously been selling, just before the house of cards crashed.

Latter-day financial economics is blind to all of this. It necessarily treats stocks, bonds, options, derivatives and so forth as securities whose properties can be accepted largely at face value, and quantified in terms of return and risk. That quantification permits the calculation of price, using standard formulae. But everything in the formulae depends on the instruments being as they are represented to be. For if they are not, then what formula could possibly apply?

An older strand of institutional economics understood that a security is a contract in law. It can only be as good as the legal system that stands behind it. Some fraud is inevitable, but in a functioning system it must be rare. It must be considered – and rightly – a minor problem. If fraud – or even the perception of fraud – comes to dominate the system, then there is no foundation for a market in the securities. They become trash. And more deeply, so do the institutions responsible for creating, rating and selling them. Including, so long as it fails to respond with appropriate force, the legal system itself.

Control frauds always fail in the end. But the failure of the firm does not mean the fraud fails: the perpetrators often walk away rich. At some point, this requires subverting, suborning or defeating the law. This is where crime and politics intersect. At its heart, therefore, the financial crisis was a breakdown in the rule of law in America.

Ask yourselves: is it possible for mortgage originators, ratings agencies, underwriters, insurers and supervising agencies NOT to have known that the system of housing finance had become infested with fraud? Every statistical indicator of fraudulent practice – growth and profitability – suggests otherwise. Every examination of the record so far suggests otherwise. The very language in use: “liars’ loans,” “ninja loans,” “neutron loans,” and “toxic waste,” tells you that people knew. I have also heard the expression, “IBG,YBG;” the meaning of that bit of code was: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

If doubt remains, investigation into the internal communications of the firms and agencies in question can clear it up. Emails are revealing. The government already possesses critical documentary trails — those of AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. Those documents should be investigated, in full, by competent authority and also released, as appropriate, to the public. For instance, did AIG knowingly issue CDS against instruments that Goldman had designed on behalf of Mr. John Paulson to fail? If so, why? Or again: Did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appreciate the poor quality of the RMBS they were acquiring? Did they do so under pressure from Mr. Henry Paulson? If so, did Secretary Paulson know? And if he did, why did he act as he did? In a recent paper, Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson argue that the “Paulson Put” was intended to delay an inevitable crisis past the election. Does the internal record support this view?

Let us suppose that the investigation that you are about to begin confirms the existence of pervasive fraud, involving millions of mortgages, thousands of appraisers, underwriters, analysts, and the executives of the companies in which they worked, as well as public officials who assisted by turning a Nelson’s Eye. What is the appropriate response?

Some appear to believe that “confidence in the banks” can be rebuilt by a new round of good economic news, by rising stock prices, by the reassurances of high officials – and by not looking too closely at the underlying evidence of fraud, abuse, deception and deceit. As you pursue your investigations, you will undermine, and I believe you may destroy, that illusion.

But you have to act. The true alternative is a failure extending over time from the economic to the political system. Just as too few predicted the financial crisis, it may be that too few are today speaking frankly about where a failure to deal with the aftermath may lead.

In this situation, let me suggest, the country faces an existential threat. Either the legal system must do its work. Or the market system cannot be restored. There must be a thorough, transparent, effective, radical cleaning of the financial sector and also of those public officials who failed the public trust. The financiers must be made to feel, in their bones, the power of the law. And the public, which lives by the law, must see very clearly and unambiguously that this is the case.

Thank you.

By Arthur Shaw

After jumping to Number One on the Venezuelan Twitter charts, President Chavez has launched a blog, a web page and totes a blackberry to keep his followers up to date and inform on his daily activities. The Bolivarian Revolution has quickly gain its footing in the Internet battleground.”

The blog, web page, and twitter are only a few of the moves that Venezuelan revolutionaries are making to update their electoral tactics. Golinger is a strong supporter of and participant in these tactical changes.

Lenin, who along with glorious Fidel and the glorious Ho Chin Minh, was one the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, said in his book ‘What Is To Be Done’ that the class struggle has three main manifestations … the political, economic, and ideological … and each of the three manifestations are at par with the other two.

[We have not overlooked the fact that Fidel's presence still blesses us in the 21st century.]

What a section of Venezuelan revolutionaries are doing with their laptops and cell phones has ramifications in both the political and ideological struggles within the wider class struggle.

Let’s look at the genesis of these changes. Howard Dean, the 2004 bourgeois liberal candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the USA, massively introduced propaganda and organization through laptops and cell phones into the electoral struggle. But Dean and his forces overestimated the role of “high technology” and underestimated the continued importance to person-to-person organization in the 2004 Democratic Party primaries in the USA. So, Dean blew his big chance and let US Senator John Kerry whip Dean for the 2004 presidential nomination.

Then, the reactionary middle class college students in Venezuela appeared on the world stage with their laptops and cell phones in 2007, repeatedly organizing and marching in large numbers around the issue of the non-renewal of the broadcast license of RCTV and later that year for the defeat of the constitutional reform proposed by Venezuelan revolutionaries led by Hugo Chavez.

The reactionary middle class students and their allies won the constitutional reform … that is, the reactionary youth made a big contribution to the defeat of the constitutional reform. But these reactionary middle class college students never understood or cared how politically powerfully the tool … the laptops and cell phones …. they held in their hands were.

Many people wondered whether what the reactionary middle class college students did was just a “Venezuelan thing,” and therefore inapplicable to the rest of the world.

Next, in 2008, appeared Barack Obama, assisted by the evil electoral genius, David Axelrod, and blew everybody’s minds. In 2008, Axelrod, intensified the impact and expanded the applications of laptop and cell phone campaigning like nobody would believe. The standard departments of electoral struggle are planning and budgeting, fundraising, targeting, voter contact, free media, paid media, candidate activity, opposition research, volunteers, get-out-the-vote, and anti-fraud operations.

In 2004, Howard Dean used his laptop and cell phone capabilities mostly for fundraising. In 2007, the reactionary middle class college students in Venezuela used their similar capabilities mostly for mobilizing volunteers to march and to throw Molotov cocktails. But Axelrod, the electoral monster, applied with savage and barbaric intensity those capabilities to ALL eleven departments of the campaign in 2008.

AKP&D Message and the Media is the cutting-edge US electoral and media consulting firm catering to both liberal and reactionary candidates in the USA and abroad. For example, the reactionary Francisco de Narvarez in the Argentine 2009 legislative elections and the reactionary Kamla Persad-Bissessar in May 2010 general election in Trinidad & Tobago are two recent instances of the firm’s handiwork.

Before 2009, the firm known as Axelrod & Associates was the predecessor firm of AKP&D Message and Media with the above-mentioned David Axelrod as the managing partner of the firm. AKP&D is named after its four original partners: David Axelrod, John Kupper, David Plouffe, and John Del Cecato. All four were members of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, with Plouffe serving as campaign manager, Axelrod as senior strategist, and Del Cecato as media advisor. Axelrod left AKP&D to serve as senior advisor to the President and sold his interest in the firm to Kupper, Del Cecato and Larry Grisolano.

AKP&D did very well in Trinidad in May when Obama’s political consulting firm openly helped to stab Patrick Manning, Obama’s top and most servile ally in the Caribbean, in the back and substitute a bourgeois reactionary in Manning’s place. But, in the same month of May, things didn’t turn out so well in Suriname where revolutionary Desi Bourterse, aspires for power, contending against AKP&D which disguised itself as Dutch and no-name US operatives. The results of the Suriname contest in May are still indeterminate. Bourterse, in Suriname, used AKP&D tricks against AKP&D. Bourterse cleverly reached out to young voters who are more familiar with cell phones and laptops and therefore more familiar with electronic voting machines … and vice versa … than their older compatriots. But the effort of Bouterse was somewhat different because it assumed a participatory character. The campaign mostly supplied the scripts which supporters individually and independently reached out to voters. It worked.

The National Endowment For Democracy (NED) … the US government’s front organization in international electoral struggle, which corrupts the political processes of other countries with millions of dollars in bribes … seems to be struck in prolong negotiations with AKP&D over whether AKP&D or NED will boss the so-called “opposition” in the September 26 legislative elections in Venezuela.

AKP&D must be slobbering or foaming at the mouth to get at Venezuela, because Venezuela is a cell phone heaven. The outcome of the inter-imperialist tug of war is a foregone conclusion since since NED answers to US Sen. John McCain and AKP&D to the Oval Office.

A some people, like Eva Golinger, are trying to alert the workers and revolutionaries about the unique challenges that the September 26 electoral contest poses for the revolution. But suddenly some of these people, like Golinger, who side with the workers and revolutionaries, find themselves surrounded by bizarre specie of animals … barking, growling, snarling, screeching, and … last but not least, howling,

Long before the repulsive breakthrough of the reactionary middle class college students in Venezuela in 2007, Eva Golinger saw and spoke about the possibilities of a class struggle waged, in large part, on laptops and in cell phones in both the spheres of political and ideological struggle. Indeed, Golinger pioneered some of the tactics in the ideological struggle now used in cyberspace.

Often, these tactics, which Golinger initially developed, are used by opportunists to disparage Eva Golinger herself.

Now, the mass of the workers’ and revolutionary movement is looking at the recent moves of Hugo Chavez in cyberspace. But this time, the masses are looking at Chavez, not as his audience to be persuaded and entertained. Now, the masses are looking at Chavez as his students to be informed. How can they harness themselves the potentialities of the Internet and IT stuff to advance the workers’ and revolutionary movement without the intervention of the State or the Party?

If the workers and revolutionaries themselves seize the possibilities of Internet and IT stuff, their advance will become unstoppable in the class struggle.

The advance of the workers’ and revolutionary movements doesn’t make everybody happy. Some people are jealous and envious by nature or others by habit or still others by congenital depravity (an aberration of nature). So, these jealous and envious people sneak up behind other people who contribute to the workers’ and revolutionary advance and these sneaky people take a bite out of these contributors. The jealous and envious say they bite because they believe in “the truth” and the people, whom they bite, don’t believe in “the truth.” But this “truth,” about which jealous and envious brag, is only a pretext to bite.

Fortunately, Golinger carries a stick with her and keeps her eyes open for these bizarre people who bite.

Using her stick, Eva Golinger has cracked many of these people, who bite, over their big heads as they neared her.