Truthout has published the interview of Jane McAlevey by Laura Flanders titled Help Workers Connect the Dots to This Larger System of Oppression.

Jane McAlevey has a book coming out this fall from Verso called “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement.” I started by asking her to introduce herself, and then to talk about hell-raising in Wisconsin and the lessons the labor movement might draw from that experience, with relevance to the elections that loom just ahead of us.
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JM: I think the top lesson in our view is that there is not enough internal radical, political education taking place inside of America’s unions. If there was one thing we had to do differently, it’s actually trust that our rank and file can handle a lot of the information and that the rank and file will know what to do with real facts, real information, and what’s really happening.

The above video plays for me if I use Google Chrome, but I cannot get it to work for me in Firefox.

Jane McAlevey speaks rapidly, so you might also want to consult the transcript published in the article.

This is interview provides insights as to what we should be doing in our efforts to get Elizabeth Warren elected as Senator from Massachusetts. I am still working on learning how to do what Jane suggests.

Politico has the story Obama ad: Romney will raise your taxes about this ad.

The Real News Network weekly report from William Black Black Report: Majority of Wall St. Money Now Goes to Romney covers a few different subjects.

One topic of the conversation is that the credit rating agencies are again becoming the enablers of Wall Street fraud.

What the credit rating agencies discovered, though, was that they were the key to making Wall Street possible to make their fortunes. And so they learned to negotiate, and they became not just credit rating agencies; they became advisers on the same deal that they were rating, despite the obvious conflict of interest. And so they would structure the deal to ensure that it would get a AAA rating and it would get a AAA rating even though the great bulk of the loans backing it were fraudulent liars’ loans. And so a chart of income for the rating agencies looks like, you know, an incredibly steep ascending hill, and they made an absolute fortune.

They got embarrassed, but you’ll note that they didn’t get sued successfully, and, of course, they didn’t even get threatened with prosecution. So that embarrassment period where they supposedly tried to toughen up their act only lasted around a year. And what they found was whoever was toughest lost business to whoever was weak—again, this race to the bottom or Gresham’s dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the professions. And the result is that they’ve pitched, you know, thrown to the curb the only guy at Standard & Poor’s—which is the biggest of the rating agencies—who was their symbol of trying to be tougher.

What really irks me about this is that one of the fundamentals of my investing strategy depends on a selection of S & P A-rated companies. I have to be extra vigilant about believing anything from S & P. Since they did this before, I guess this is not anything new with them.

The article by Matt Taibbi Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital is the one mentioned in my previous post Matt Taibbi: The Secret to Mitt Romney’s Fortune? Greed, Debt and Forcing Others to Foot the Bill.

Sometimes it is hard to find a quote that really captures the essence of the article so that the reader will be enticed to follow the link to the article.  In this case, Matt Taibbi has provided just what I am looking for.

But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

I know that the real Romney fans will not be able to process this information.  I just hope that there are enough voters whose minds are still open.

Perhaps we can turn Mitt Romney’s prominence on the political stage to good use.  If people start to understand how he made his fortune, there might be a great enough outcry to make these practices illegal.   It seems to me that it is against the law already for a person to declare bankruptcy just after taking steps to hide assets from the bankruptcy judge.  Since Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, I don’t understand how he gets away with stripping assets from a company, raiding pension funds, borrowing money in the company’s name, and then putting the company into bankruptcy.  Certainly any bankruptcy judge should be able to see the fraud that was committed and insist that the stolen assets should be reclaimed for the benefit of the people from whom the money was stolen.

Maybe instead of going to the White House, Mitt Romney will go to jail. If any of the Republican favorite “Three strikes and you are out” laws get applied, Romney could get a life sentence as a habitual criminal.

I hadn’t finished reading the article when I picked out the quote above. I am still making my way through the article and the quotable paragraphs keep piling up. I hardly know which one to choose. Here is another, and I am not sure either of these are the best ones.

This business model wasn’t really “helping,” of course – and it wasn’t new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the “bust-out,” in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. “That’s all it is.”

Ok, Ifinally finished all 5 pages of the article, and I will leave you with the concluding paragraph.

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

The Atlantic has the story The Real Mystery of Paul Ryan’s Marathon Time.

Executive summary: the mystery in this case is why someone just stepping into the spotlight of national attention would risk telling an (a) entirely unnecessary and (b) very easily disprovable lie. It doesn’t make “normal” political sense, where you lie to get out of a jam, or because you think you can’t be caught. Now the details:

As you may be able to tell from my recent posts, I am coming to the conclusion that the Romeny/Ryan ticket is headed by a couple of con men.  Now this evidence of possible pathological lying by Ryan.

Am I ashamed of piling on?  No way.  If they can accuse Al Gore of lying when he said something that was true, I can surely say they are lying when they actually are.

The article above has a link to an article in The New Yorker Lie or Mistake? Paul Ryan’s Marathoning Past.

I particularly liked what one person posted as a comment.

from a post on another comment board “Forgetting whether your marathon personal best is over 4 hours or under 3 hours is like forgetting whether your spouse is a man or a woman.”

HoneyM suggested the Boston.com story Report: Boxer Micky Ward cancels planned endorsement of Scott Brown.

That story links to the original story in The Lowell Sun ‘The Fighter’ bails on Brown.

Reached on his cell, Ward said he admired Brown’s spirit and respected the way he could “go out there and listen and talk like a guy who is positive and wants to do right by us.”

Fingers struck keyboard and within minutes a brief story about Ward’s endorsement of Brown was ready for The Sun’s Friday edition and  lowellsun.com.

But hold the phone.

Roughly a half-hour after Ward confirmed he was backing Brown, ‘The Fighter’ called back. He said he had given his endorsement a little more thought.

“I can’t support Scott Brown,” Ward said. “I just can’t do it.”

Within 30 minutes, Ward either did some Googling or someone close to him reminded him about where Brown stood on some hot-button political topics.

“I found out Scott (Brown) is anti-union and I’m a Teamster guy,” said Ward. “I found out he’s also against gay marriage and I say if you love someone you should have the same rights no matter who you are.”

In our canvassing, phone calls, and other contacts with voters, we find that a lot of Brown supporters just do not understand Brown’s record in the Senate.  They even find it hard to believe when I tell them about some of the bills he voted for and some that he voted against.

Scott Brown voted against equal pay for equal work.   He also voted for the Blunt amendment to limit women’s access to birth control.

If people can just get over the Brown campaign’s smear tactics against Elizabeth Warren, they find that she is more in tune with their issues than Scott Brown is.

The Chicago Tribune has Clarence Page’s article Team Romney’s war against facts.

I think the written part is a lot stronger than the video commentary.

It’s hard to tell who had a looser grip on reality as the Republican National Convention wrapped up; Clint Eastwood or Mitt Romney’s spin doctors.
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f you can’t trust a campaign to tell you the truth in its speeches and ads, do you really want to trust it with your Medicare?

In every day life, people wake up to the fact that they have been taken in by con artists, usually after losing their life’s savings.  Since Mitt Romney is not such a likable fellow, one of the tools of a con artist seems to be missing.  Perhaps this will be enough to enable people to see Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for what they really are before giving up their fortunes to these con artists.

I have two hopes for the Democratic convention.  One is that the Democrats will avoid bending the truth let alone outright lying.  The second is that the media won’t find it necessary, for balance, to find as many lies in the Democratic convention as they found in the Republican convention even when the Democratic lies don’t exist.