Replies to post #144560 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Some Greeks Fear Government Is Selling Nation

By RACHEL DONADIO and STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 22, 2011

ATHENS — They are the crown jewels of Greece’s socialist state, and they are now likely to go to the highest bidder: the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki; prime Mediterranean real estate; the national lottery; Greek Telecom; the postal bank and the national railway system.

And then comes the mandated deeper round of austerity measures, which will slash the wages of police officers, firefighters and other state workers who are protesting in Athens, and raise the taxes of citizens already inflamed by a recession-plagued economy and soaring joblessness.

After winning a pivotal confidence vote on his new cabinet on Tuesday, Prime Minister George Papandreou now has an even tougher task: to carry out a radical remedy of forced auctions and fiscal austerity for a sickened economy already in a deep slump.

The European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, known as the “troika,” say that is the only way out for a heavily indebted Greece, while some economists say the program resembles medieval bloodletting — a dose of pain highly unlikely to revive the patient.

Mr. Papandreou’s first task is to persuade his governing Socialist Party to pass a bill that would save or raise about $40 billion by 2015, equivalent to 12 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product, through wage cuts and tax increases, at a time when the economy is shrinking.

To put that in perspective, spending cuts and tax increases of a similar scale in the United States would amount to $1.75 trillion, considerably more sweeping than even the most far-reaching proposals for reducing the American federal budget deficit. And Greece has promised to generate another $72 billion by selling off prime state assets, which many Greeks consider a fire sale of national patrimony.

While the commitment to austerity will allow Greece access to a fresh infusion of international aid, a growing chorus of economists say that the government’s new program will at best delay default and a restructuring of its debt, which is already more than 150 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Steeper budget cuts and tax increases, they say, are the enemy of economic growth, which Greece desperately needs to make its debt burden lighter.

“You cannot keep on milking the cow without feeding it,” said Konstantinos Mihalos, the president of the Hellenic Chamber of Commerce in Athens.

In fact many economists fear Greece has already entered a “debt trap,” where paying the interest on its mound of debt requires more and more loans. “The Greeks have been told to accept more of the medicine that has already failed to treat the disease,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London.

The Greeks have already reduced their deficit by five percentage points of the gross domestic product, “unprecedented cuts in a modern economy,” Mr. Tilford said. “But the cuts have had a much stronger negative impact on the economy than the troika imagined, and fiscal austerity has pushed the economy deep into recession. Debt can only be paid out of income, and that means growth.”

Greece does not have access to many tools to fight recession, like devaluing its currency or cutting interest rates, at least as long as it remains a member of the euro zone. Its monetary policy is controlled by the European Central Bank.

Some independent economists accept that Greece has no choice but to try a fresh round of cuts. Edwin M. Truman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington said Greece had to go through more pain because it had run a budget deficit even before making payments on its debt, meaning it needed loans to pay off its loans.

Only after Greece reorganizes its budget, tax collection and labor market and is running a surplus — not including interest payments on the debt — can economists begin to calculate how much in debt payments Greece is actually able to afford, and then figure out how big a debt restructuring it needs.

“As long as they’re running a primary deficit, they need to keep tightening the belt,” Mr. Truman said. “Rescheduling now doesn’t relieve Greece of the burden of fixing the economy to create a surplus.”

It is not getting any easier. In the year since its first bailout, Greece has cut $17 billion through across-the-board wage cuts, layoffs and attrition in its bloated state sector, which employs 800,000 people, a quarter of the Greek work force. But given its recession, the economy shrank and tax revenues fell, meaning that Greece did not meet the original target of a government deficit of 9.1 percent of G.D.P. as agreed with its foreign lenders, prompting them to demand more cuts.

European demands have placed Mr. Papandreou in an increasingly untenable position. He must sell the increasingly restive Greek people on more austerity with no clear signs of recovery. And he has to persuade his Socialist Party on reforms that undo almost everything the party has stood for in the past.

At least one Socialist member of Parliament, Alexandros Athanasiadis, has already announced that he will not vote for the new austerity measures, citing his opposition to selling part of the state’s stake in the electricity utility whose power plants dominate his district in northeastern Greece.

On Wednesday, members of the public power company union, Genop, occupied the Transport Ministry and orchestrated some power failures to protest the sale, which seeks to reduce the state’s stake to 34 percent from 51 percent in the profitable company.

To many Greeks, selling that and many other state-owned companies and assets, even those that currently lose money, is tantamount to a loss of sovereignty — especially if wealthy investors from Germany and the other big European powers pushing austerity of Greece end up purchasing the assets for a hefty discount.

“We’ve always been advocates of privatization because the national state cannot play the role of the entrepreneur and has in fact proven to be a complete disaster every time they attempt to do so,” said Mr. Mihalos of the Athens Chamber of Commerce.

“But at these extremely low levels, especially for those companies quoted on the stock exchange, we have to be very wary,” he added. “If we go by today’s values, as a result of the recession and the crisis the country finds itself in, it will be really selling the crown jewels at a pittance of their cost.”

Mr. Papandreou’s government has not managed to make a convincing case for the sell-off to many Greeks, where the idea of a fire sale has taken hold, setting off a wave of national indignation. “Imagine if you asked me for my apartment, and I gave you the whole building,” said Dorothea Ekonomopoulou, a public school teacher in Athens, as she stood among demonstrators in Syntagma Square this week.

Rachel Donadio reported from Athens, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

*

Related

Greek Parliament Passes Critical Confidence Vote (June 22, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/world/europe/22greece.html

Derivatives Cloud the Possible Fallout From a Greek Default (June 23, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23swaps.html [next below]

Tapped by a Rival, Greece’s New Finance Minister Faces Daunting Task (June 23, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23euro.html

Major Banks and Insurers Are Asked to Assist in a 2nd Greek Rescue Package (June 23, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23banks.html

Interactive Maps: Debt Rising in Europe
Greece is not the only country in Europe with problems with credit and debt. (June 16, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/06/business/global/european-debt-map.html

*

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/europe/23greece.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/europe/23greece.html?pagewanted=all ]


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Derivatives Cloud the Possible Fallout From a Greek Default


"There is lack of transparency and visibility in these products, and that increases the risk," said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, a boutique banking firm in New York.
Jin Lee/Bloomberg News



By LOUISE STORY
Published: June 22, 2011

It’s the $616 billion question: Does the euro crisis have a hidden A.I.G.?

No one seems to be sure, in large part because the world of derivatives is so murky. But the possibility that some company out there may have insured billions of dollars of European debt has added a new tension to the sovereign default debate.

In years past, when financial crises in Argentina and Russia left those countries unable to make good on their government debts, they simply defaulted. But this time around, swaps and other sorts of contracts have become so common and so intertwined in the financial markets that there are fears among regulators and financial players about how a Greek default would play out among derivatives holders.

The looming uncertainties are whether these contracts — which insure against possibilities like a Greek default — are concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and if these companies will be able to pay out billions of dollars to cover losses during a default. If there were a single company standing behind many of these contracts, that company would be akin to the American International Group of the euro crisis. The American insurer needed a $182 billion federal bailout [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30aig.html ] during the financial crisis because it had insured the performance of mortgage bonds through derivatives and could not pay on all of them.

Even regulators seem unsure of whether a Greek default would reveal such concentrated risk in the hands of just a few companies. Spokeswomen for the central banks of both Europe and the United States would not say whether their researchers had studied holdings of such contracts among nonbank entities like insurance companies and hedge funds.

Asked about derivatives tied to Europe at a Wednesday press conference, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that the direct exposure is small but that “a disorderly default in one of those countries would no doubt roil financial markets globally. It would have a big impact on credit spreads, on stock prices and so on. And so in that respect I think the effects in the United States would be quite significant.”

Derivatives traders and analysts are debating just how much money is involved in these contracts and what sort of threat they pose to markets in Europe and the United States. On the one hand, just over $5 billion is tied up in credit-default swap contracts that will pay out if Greece defaults, according to Markit [ http://www.markit.com/en/ ], a financial data firm based in London. That is less than 1 percent the size of Greece’s economy, but that is a conservative calculation that counts protections banks have in place offsetting their positions, and is called the net exposure.

The less conservative figure, the gross exposure, is $78.7 billion for Greece, according to Markit. And there are many other types of contracts, like about $44 billion in other guarantees tied to Greece, according to the Bank of International Settlements [ http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qa1106.pdf ]. The gross exposure of the five most financially pressed European Union countries — Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain — is about $616 billion. And the broader figure on all derivatives from those countries is unknown.

The pervasiveness of these opaque contracts has complicated negotiations for European officials, and it underscores calls for more transparency in the derivatives market.

The uncertainty, financial analysts say, has led European officials to push for a “voluntary” Greek bond financing solution that may sidestep a default, rather than the forced deals of other eras. “There’s not any clarity here because people don’t know,” said Christopher Whalen, editor of The Institutional Risk Analyst [ http://us1.institutionalriskanalytics.com/pub/IRAMain.asp ]. “This is why the Europeans came up with this ridiculous deal, because they don’t know what’s out there. They are afraid of a default. The industry is still refusing to provide the disclosure needed to understand this. They’re holding us hostage. The Street doesn’t want you to see what they’ve written.”

Regulators are aware of this problem. Financial reform packages on both sides of the Atlantic mandated many changes to the derivatives market, and regulators around the globe are drafting new rules for these contracts that are meant to add transparency as well as security. But they are far from finished and could take years to put into effect.

Darrell Duffie [ http://www.darrellduffie.com/ ], a professor who has studied derivatives at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, said that he was concerned that regulators may not have adequately studied what contagion might occur among swaps holders, in the case of a Greek default.

Regulators, he said, “have access to everything they need to have. Whether they’ve collected all the information and analyzed it is different question. I worry because many of those leaders have said there’s no way we’re going to let Greece default. Does that mean they haven’t had conversations about what happens if Greece defaults? Is their commitment so severe that they haven’t had real discussions about it in the backrooms?”

Regulators aren’t saying much. When asked what data the Federal Reserve had collected on American financial companies and their swaps tied to European debt, Barbara Hagenbaugh, a spokeswoman, referred to a speech made by Mr. Bernanke [ http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20110505a.htm ] in May in which he did not mention derivatives tied to Greece. At the Wednesday press conference, Mr. Bernanke said that commonly cited data on derivatives do not take into account the offsetting positions banks have on their Greek exposures. And with those positions, he said, even if there is a Greek default, “the effects are very small.”

At the European Central Bank, Eszter Miltenyi, a spokeswoman, said: “This is much too sensitive I think for us to have a conversation on this.”

On Wall Street, traders are debating whether the industry’s process for unwinding credit-default swaps would run smoothly if Greece defaulted. The process is tightly controlled by a small group of bankers [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/business/12advantage.html ] who meet in an industry group called the International Swaps and Derivatives Association [ http://www2.isda.org/ ].

The process is fairly well developed, but it has been little tested on the debt of countries. For the most part, Wall Street has cashed in on credit-default swaps tied to corporations’ debt.

For most purposes, determining whether a default occurred in a country’s debt falls to ratings agencies like Fitch and Moody’s. But for the derivatives market, a committee of I.S.D.A. makes the call.

If the committee decides there was a default, it passes the baton to Markit, which is partly owned by the banks. Markit holds an auction to determine how much value has been lost on the debt, and that determines how much money is paid out to the parties that purchased the insurance.

Marc Barrachin, who runs the auctions, said there was no reason to worry about the process.

“The process is very smooth, very well understood by market participants,” said Mr. Barrachin, the director of credit products at Markit. “I mean if you go back to 2008 right in the fall, in five days we had auctions for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Brothers, and two weeks after that you had Washington Mutual. I go back to that period of stress and the orderly settlements of large amounts of credit derivatives, for names that were widely followed, were testament of the efficiency of the auction system.”

In the case of A.I.G., there was not an unwind process run by I.S.D.A. because A.I.G.’s contracts were tied to mortgage bonds. Those sorts of derivatives pay out money over time, whereas derivatives tied to a country’s debt pay out on one occasion: if a default occurs. That makes sovereign derivatives more similar to derivatives on corporate bonds and different in some ways from the situation at A.I.G.

But the smoothness of the process would be irrelevant if the risk were concentrated in just a few weak institutions.

The uncertainty around how a sovereign default would course through the derivatives market had greatly increased the price premiums banks were charging to put on new derivatives trades related to European countries. As of last week, the price to insure against default on $10 million of Greek debt was $1.9 million per year, up from $775,000 a year ago, according to Markit.

“There is lack of transparency and visibility in these products, and that increases the risk,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman [ http://www.bbh.com/index.shtml ], a boutique banking firm in New York.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23swaps.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23swaps.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23swaps.html ]


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Greece and You

Editorial
Published: June 21, 2011

The euro-zone bailout of Greece is, in good part, a bailout of European banks. In France and Germany alone, banks hold some $90 billion worth of public and private Greek debt. The European Central Bank also holds Greek government debt, and the fear is that if Greece defaults, cascading losses could threaten all of Europe.

Are American banks also vulnerable? No one is sure. They are not big lenders to Greece, but they are big players in the derivatives markets. If Greece defaulted, a European bank holding a credit-default swap on Greek debt from an American bank would be entitled to a payout from that bank.

Credit-default swaps are the kind of derivatives that were behind the blowup of the American International Group and the near meltdown that followed in the global financial system. From the available evidence, it doesn’t appear that a Greek default would have the same destructive power, but no one is eager to test the proposition.

In his recent confirmation hearing to be the next leader of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, the central banker of Italy, warned that no one really knows who is on the hook for these risky financial instruments. “Who are the owners of credit-default swaps? Who has insured others against a default of the country?” he asked.

Warning of a potential “chain of contagion,” he argued against requiring banks to restructure Greek debt — which could involve extending repayment terms or writing off principal — even though Greece’s apparent inability to pay in full makes a restructuring all but inevitable.

Whether or not American banks are at serious risk from this crisis, the fact is that nearly three years after A.I.G., derivatives are still largely unregulated. The financial reforms that are supposed to improve transparency and reduce speculation — trading derivatives on fully regulated exchanges, strict reporting requirements to regulators and new rules on capital adequacy and business conduct — have yet to be implemented.

The process has been slow in the face of heavy lobbying by the banks. Republican lawmakers are bent on derailing reform by any means necessary, including starving regulatory budgets, impeding the confirmation of regulatory nominees and pressing regulators to adopt light-touch rules. Some Democratic lawmakers and Obama officials are in favor of exemptions on specific derivatives rules that Wall Street opposes.

The uncertainty is greater when you consider that credit-default swaps are only one type of derivative that links banks worldwide. What dangers lurk in other derivatives, like those on currencies and foreign exchanges?

Greece is bound to get more bailouts as long as policy makers believe the alternative could be systemwide collapse. On Tuesday, the Greek Parliament gave the prime minister, George Papandreou, a vote of confidence [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/world/europe/22greece.html ], clearing the way for another tough vote next week on wage cuts and other painful austerity measures that European officials are demanding in exchange for more aid [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/business/global/22euro.html ].

The Greek debt crisis is another reminder of how little has really changed since the financial blowup — and how much more must be done to avert a repeat here and around the globe.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/opinion/22wed1.html [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/opinion/22wed1.html ]


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The Real Reboot Greece Needs

By LOUKAS TSOUKALIS
Published: June 21, 2011

Athens

GREECE’S prime minister, George A. Papandreou, comfortably survived a confidence vote on Tuesday, momentarily stabilizing his fragile Socialist government and clearing the way for a fresh infusion of financial assistance from the European Union.

But the country’s economic crisis, which began at the end of 2009 when the world belatedly realized that Greece’s fiscal and trade deficits were unsustainable, is far from over; in fact it has taken a new and dangerous turn.

The specter of a default on Greece’s sovereign debt — close to $500 billion, most of it owed to other Europeans — is haunting bankers and politicians. It could set off domino effects in the euro zone and beyond. Without urgent domestic reform and help from its European partners, Greece, a country of only 11 million people, risks being caught in an unbreakable cycle of decline.

The bailout by the European Union, with the participation of the International Monetary Fund, comes with strict conditions attached, conditions that the government has only partially met so far. The government has reduced the budget deficit to 10.5 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product from more than 15 percent — no small achievement — and passed a bold pension reform plan. But it has been much more hesitant about structural reform of the economy and privatization of state-controlled enterprises, because of organized opposition by vested interests, resistance from within the party and from trade unions, and the snail’s pace of Greek bureaucracy.

With unemployment at 16 percent, Greeks have been taking to the streets in protest against unpopular measures and a political system at risk of losing its legitimacy. Populists are having a field day, offering simplistic solutions and seeking scapegoats, preferably those beyond the nation’s borders. This is certainly not a phenomenon confined to Greece.

Mr. Papandreou has reshuffled his cabinet and tried to appease his party members, while putting out feelers to the main center-right opposition party over the creation of a national unity government — so far, unsuccessfully. He has been undoubtedly weakened in the process. Greece desperately needs a radical renewal of its political class; at stake is the survival of many members of that establishment. It also needs a peaceful revolution in its economy and society. But democracy takes time. The next parliamentary elections may not be very far off, but the political and economic climate has to improve first.

A few bold measures would send the message that the government is serious about scaling down the public sector. The solution is not more taxes to pay for poor quality services and over-staffed state organizations, the result of years of clientele politics in which the party in power appointed its friends to taxpayer-financed jobs. Greece needs more effective tax collection, together with the provision of a safety net for the rising numbers of the economically vulnerable.

But economic measures are surely not enough; in drama, as ancient Greeks knew, you need catharsis. In today’s Greece, this means that people who have mismanaged public funds should be brought to justice. Neither of the main political parties has been enthusiastic about this, because they fear the unpleasant surprises from opening such a Pandora’s box. The creation of a national unity government, with a specific program of limited duration, would help to restore public confidence and broaden support for politically difficult measures, notably the elimination of public sector jobs.

For the heavily indebted and uncompetitive economies of the European periphery, fiscal consolidation and structural reform — the mantras of I.M.F. economists — are a must. But what is the right dose of austerity? Too much could be economically counterproductive. Public tolerance of austerity may be reaching the breaking point.

Growth is the key: without it, any adjustment program is doomed to fail. In trying to cut bureaucratic tape, Greek politicians will need to create an environment that is propitious to investment, which has not been the case for many years. European funds for investment could bolster the determination of local politicians to proceed with structural reform. Some in Europe are already talking about a new Marshall Plan for financially embattled countries. Solidarity with strings attached is a politically intelligent form of investment.

The sovereign debt problem in several European countries, including Greece, raises the question of who should pay for the accumulated mistakes of the past — taxpayers or private creditors — and how much of the burden each country should bear. We need a political agreement on these questions, instead of piecemeal measures that leave politicians two steps behind the bond markets.

Greece is at a dangerous crossroads. Other countries — Portugal, Ireland, maybe Spain — are coming behind it. The consequences of excessive borrowing and consumption, of the bursting of the credit bubble, have caught up with us. If we fail to deal with them effectively, the achievements of decades of increasing integration and shared sovereignty in postwar Europe may no longer be taken for granted.

Loukas Tsoukalis is a professor of European integration at the University of Athens and the president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/opinion/22tsoukalis.html


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(items linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53285282 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64389324 and preceding and following

[fuagf]

F6, great detail and so much information! Walmart's no doubt is geared against the working person AND against
women especially ..on the question of MONEY TALKS .. you know, this stuff .. i had a lot of trouble finding something,
couldn't using Google, so used Bing .. which prompted my .. aside: PLEASE NOTE BOTTOM) .. excerpt ..

"The power struggle between employers and unions promises to be a factor in the 2012 elections. Unions were significant contributors to President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign and played a crucial role in drumming up votes for him and congressional Democrats.

In the 2010 election cycle, labor unions overall contributed $73.4 million to federal candidates, parties and outside groups, down from $74.55 million in the 2008 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' calculations of the 20 biggest union contributors at the time. In both cycles, at least 90% of the unions' party-related contributions were to Democrats. Unions also spend money on political efforts not directly tied to a candidate."

Shadowy Groups Have Poured Nearly $227 Million Into 2010 Elections
198 Comments

By AVNI PATEL
Oct. 27, 2010

Oil and gas industry services and investors have contributed $415,000 from their company coffers to fund a group blasting Democratic Senate candidates in four states with attack ads.

A North Carolina pharmaceutical executive has spent $3.3 million of his personal wealth to spearhead another group that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mailings to influence Senate races in nine states.

Labor unions and Las Vegas resorts are largely funding a group that has focused on attacking Republican challengers to Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid's seat.

The three groups -- First Amendment Alliance, Rightchange.com and Patriot Majority -- are among more than 230 independent groups that have poured $227 million into the 2010 elections so far, according to federal election data available through the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, an organization that tracks campaign spending. Of the total that can be tracked, some $103 million has been spent to support Republican or oppose Democrats, while $67 million has gone toward supporting Democrats or opposing Republicans.

Campaign finance watchdog groups say the flood of money reflects an altered election spending landscape following a series of Supreme Court decisions that have cleared the way for independent groups to raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions, and individuals to directly fund ads, mailings and other messaging expressly supporting or opposing federal candidates in the final days running up to an election. The interests backing the groups are not always apparent to voters, and often the donors remain secret.
PHOTO Labor unions and Las Vegas resorts are largely funding a group that has focused on attacking the Republican challengers to Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid?s seat, including general election opponent Sharron Angle.
Julie Jacobson/AP Photo
In this Oct. 14, 2010, file photo Republican... View Full Caption

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"We're talking about a new kind of spending," said Taylor Lincoln of Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that follows campaign spending. "There are probably a lot of corporate spenders out there that, for fear for their reputation and a sense of what was right and the law of the land, didn't want to play that game. Now they don't have to fear any kind of legal retribution. That's a big deal."

The First Amendment Alliance, funded largely by oil and gas interests, is one of the groups ramping up fundraising and spending this election cycle. In 2008, the group spent $120,000 on radio ads, and raised most of its money from three donors, according to filings.

This year, the Alliance has raised $1.4 million, with at least $1.1 million of those receipts coming from the oil and gas interests, according to an ABC News analysis of the group's filings to the IRS. More than a third of the industry cash has come directly from businesses, while the remaining contributions have come from individual contributions from industry executives and investors.

CLICK HERE to follow the ABC News Investigative Team and Brian Ross on Facebook and join in on the discussion.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ABC-News-Investigative-Team-The-Blotter/263058762303

Top Donors Include Aghorn Energy and Anschutz Corporation

Among the Alliance's top donors are two private corporations, Odessa, Texas-based Aghorn Energy Inc and Denver-based Anschutz Corporation. In previous election cycles, the corporations had been constrained in making independent expenditures on ads that expressly advocated one candidate over another.

Top individual contributors include Texas rancher Russell Gordy, energy investor Jonathan Farber, and Texas homebuilder Bob Perry.

Page 2 of 3

In the past month, the Alliance has spent $1.2 million on television ads aimed at defeating Democratic Senate candidates in Colorado, Kentucky, Nevada, and West Virginia, according to Federal Election Commission data available via Sunlightfoundation.com.

Anthony Holm, an Austin-based political consultant and the Alliance's president, says the Supreme Court's decision has had no impact on the group's fundraising strategy. "This is a group run out of Texas. Overwhelmingly the largest industry in Texas is oil and gas, so one would expect donors to be in the energy industry."

Those ties are not apparent in the group's ads or on its web site, which lists a post office box in Alexandria, Virginia as its address. The web site states the Alliance's mission is to "communicate instances of waste, fraud, hypocrisy and general disregard for standards of civility in society."

At the top of the group's list of targets is incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who is fighting to keep the seat he was appointed to when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration. The group has spent $262,000 in ads opposing Bennet, and another $131,000 on ads supporting his challenger, Ken Buck, according to FEC data available via Sunlightfoundation.com.

The Democratic-leaning group Patriot Majority is one of the biggest players in the contest between Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Sharron Angle in Nevada. With its $1.6 million in ad spending attacking Angle, the group has even outspent the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Nevada.

"You can now have these essentially 'shadow parties' doing the bidding that the official parties did back in the nineties," said Lincoln.

Labor unions and Las Vegas resorts have contributed a total of $1.2 million to the group. So far, the group's spending has been solely focused on opposing Republican candidates in the Nevada race, according disclosures made to the FEC available through SunlightFoundation.com.

Earlier in the year, the group spent $320,000 on ads attacking Republican primary candidate Sue Lowden, who some believed could be a stronger threat to Reid in the general election.

GOP Donor Fred Eshelman

The Patriot Majority ads have been competing with some $3 million in ad-spending targeting Reid from conservative-leaning groups, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. The two organizations, which share a Washington, D.C. office and the same consultants, have spent nearly $30 million on races around the country, according data available at Sunlightfoundation.com. While American Crossroads publicly discloses its wealthy donors, Crossroads GPS does not.

Not all outside groups are using their cash to blanket the airwaves; some have decided to focus their efforts on direct mail, robo-calls, and web videos.

Rightchange.com has spent $2.2 million in mail pieces targeting voters in nine hotly contested Senate races, opposing Democrats and supporting Republicans. The group has also launched "micro-sites" in hotly contested House and Senate races.

The group purports to be "a new generation of conservative film, Hollywood, TV and technology professionals," according to its web site.

But the effort is largely funded and spearheaded by Fred Eshelman, a GOP donor and millionaire chief executive of a North Carolina company that runs drug trials for pharmaceutical companies.

Page 3 of 3

A spokesman for the group said that Rightchange.com aims to be "a departure from the traditional political or issue advocacy organization model," contracting with film production companies and animators to produce creative and sometimes satirical web videos aimed at going viral.

Rightchange.com is one of many groups that have set up a separate arm that is not required to disclose its donors. Lincoln says that the shadowy nature of such groups is bad for the electoral process.

"It's not good for democracy to have all these attack ads when no one is standing behind them," said Lincoln, who acknowledges that the actual impact of the spending is largely unknown. "The question is – how much of this stuff sticks? To what extent do voters tune out when the ad comes from Americans for America?"

CLICK HERE to follow the ABC News Investigative Team's coverage on Twitter. .. http://twitter.com/abcnewsblotter

Chris James contributed to this report. Click Here for the Blotter Homepage. .. http://www.abcnews.go.com/blotter

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/shadowy-groups-poured-227-million-2010-elections/story?id=11971695

OT .. PLEASE .. Open Secrets,on top of this search .. CAN YOU ACCESS IT? Just wondering if is an Australian thing?

LOL .. forget that, it must have been temporarily down as i can access it now. Good, those two links add more here.

[fuagf]

F6, Walmart, does stand against the welfare of the ordinary citizen.

"It is a militantly anti-union company that has been forced to pay hundreds of millions
of dollars to current and former employees for violations of state wage and hour laws."

In other words, the patriarchy of old has been reconfigured into a more systematically authoritarian structure ... [...]

There used to be a remedy for this sort of managerial authoritarianism: it was called a union, which
bargained over not only wages and pensions but also the kind of qualitative issues, including promotion and
transfer policies, that have proved so vexing for non-unionized employees at Wal-Mart and other big retailers. [...]

The rules governing organizing are the focus of a power struggle between unions and employers after decades of
declining union membership. Only 6.9% of private sector workers belonged to unions in 2010, and just 11.9%
of all U.S. workers, according to the Labor Department. In 1983, unions represented 20.1% of all workers.

Just out of interest .. Australia .. Union membership on the rise
Chris Zappone .. April 17, 2009

Australian union membership posted its first increase in three years in 2008.

Total union membership rose to 1.8 million workers last year, up 3% from the 1.7 million in 2007, according to data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Reflecting organised labour's hobbled growth after a decade under pressure from Prime Minister John Howard's industrial relations overhauls, last year saw the first increase in the total number of union members since 2005, when the WorkChoices legislation came into effect.

"Of course with Work Choices, the playing field was tilted against unions," said Dr Brigid van Wanrooy of the Workplace Research Centre.

"But it also brought a lot of attention to unions," she said. "Maybe that’s why union rates have stabilised."

The increase in the growth of the workforce over the same period, however, means the proportion organised workers remained steady at 19% in 2008, unchanged from 2007, the ABS said.

More than four out of 10 public sector workers were union members last year, while only 14% of private sector workers were, the ABS said.

In addition to the set-back to recruitment caused by WorkChoices, unions had been slow to respond to the changing Australian economy, which has moved away from manufacturing and into the services sector.

Doctor van Wanrooy said it was hard to say whether unions would be able to increase their numbers more significantly in coming years.

"We’ve got see how the new industrial relations legislation plays out," she said, referring to the Fair Work Bill passed into law last month.

"We know the new Fair Work act is very focused on collective bargaining," Doctor van Wanrooy said.

The global financial crisis may drive more employees to unions, she said.

"As people start to feel more insecure about their jobs they may see more of a role for unions," she said.

As unemployment rises, however, it may erode union membership as well, she said. The jobless rate is currently 5.4% and expected to rise, possibly into double digits, by the end of 2010, as the downturn forces more people out of work.

ACTU: still relevant? .. link added here .. http://www.actu.org.au/

"This data shows unions are still relevant and strong,” said Australian Council of Trade Unions President Sharan Burrow in a statement.

Ms Burrow noted the gains came despite WorkChoices being in effect at the time.

''In these tough economic times it is especially important for workers to be members of a union," she said.

The ACTU pointed to the data showing on average, union members earn $96 more a week than non-members, according to the ABS data.

In a separate measure, factoring in people who ‘did not know’ whether they were in a union, the average weekly difference was $78 a week.

Tasmania most unionised

Tasmania ranked as the state with the highest proportion of unionised workers with 25%, while Western Australia was the lowest with 14%, the ABS said.

Machine operators were the workers most likely to be covered by collective bargaining, with 28%, followed by professionals with 25%, and community and personal service workers, of which 23% were in unions.

Of industry groups, teachers and trainers had the highest proportion of members in unions, 40%, followed by the public administration and safety officials with 34%.

The scientific and technical services industry had the slimmest proportion of unionised workers at 4%.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/union-membership-on-the-rise-20090417-a9ks.html

[fuagf]

Randy Johnson, should be a comedian ..

""This is another not so cleverly disguised effort to restrict the ability of employers to express their views during an election
campaign," said Randy Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's senior vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits."

Tell ya what, Randy, since YOU are so concerned about employers having their views suppressed, how about YOU recommending to ALL
employers that regular consultation with any union who expresses any interest in the employer's workers might be really, really constructive.

There could even be a joint monthly newsletter! Hokey dokey, Randy? Problem solved.