Our Brand Is Crisis trailer youtube

Penn, Shoen and Berland Associates violates Venezuelan Law
EXCERPT:
Thus, the gringo-British polling firm played fast and loose with the facts, and the law, in ways that it would never have been able to get away with in the United States on an election day. Justice demands that it not get away with this unethical behavior in Latin America either. To wit: If the pollsters and Penn, Schoen & Berland knew that polling hours had already been extended when they released their poll, then the pollsters clearly intended to deceive. But if the pollsters did not know what had already been announced in the news media in Venezuela, that would indicate a level of reckless disregard for the truth and incompetence as pollsters, as well as laziness at the hour the pollsters were supposedly tracking the vote, that will seriously stain the firm’s ability to meddle credibly in Latin American elections – or any elections anywhere – ever again.

Kind reader, it gets even worse: Penn, Schoen & Berland’s “exit poll” now turns out to have been wrong… not just a little bit wrong… but a lot wrong. And beyond being very, very, inaccurate, the firm deceived the public in how it represented this sloppily conducted survey that ignored the basic methodology that all serious pollsters undertake: the “exit poll” resulted to be inaccurate by a total of 36 percentage points! Penn, Schoen & Berland got the “Yes” vote – the anti-Chavez vote – wrong by 18 percentage points, and the pro-Chavez “No” vote wrong by another 18 percentage points… and the firm must now be forced to face the music of its own deception: “a 36-point margin of error” simply does not credibly exist in the field of professional polling.

Now it comes out that the poll, according to Associated Press, was not conducted by the firm’s own employees, as falsely stated by the firm’s press release, but, rather, by a partisan, U.S.-government funded, anti-Chávez, activist group, Súmate, which paid the firm of Penn, Schoen, and Berland, apparently, for no more than the lease to misuse Penn, Schoen & Berland’s names to give credibility to incompetent and/or dishonest results. The early release of these false results was obviously intended to discredit the real results and cast a shadow on the final tally of the most fair, clean, and participated democratic referendum in Latin American history.

I wonder if Nat Rothschilds cozying up to Moammar Gaddafy's son has anything to do with Hugo Chavez visiting Libya? hmmmmmmmmm

Hugo Chavez coup
EXCERPTs:
1) Visiting Sadaam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gaddafy in Libya.

2) Right. They won't support a coup. So what happens when a coup occurs which they want to support? Simple. They don't call it a coup. They call it a "change of government" and say that Chavez was ousted "as a result of the message of the Venezuelan people." Veritable grass-roots democracy it was.

Washington Post against Hugo Chavez or is it JUST Jackson Diehl against Chavez
EXCERPT:
Challenging Chavez's grip on Venezuela
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, July 12, 2010

During one of his interminable appearances on national television, Hugo Chávez demanded to know last month why Guillermo Zuloaga, the majority owner of Venezuela's last opposition television station, was not in jail. "How is it possible that he can accuse me of such things and walk free?" the strongman demanded.

The answer is fairly simple: Zuloaga's statements about Chávez were hardly criminal, and years of government investigations had turned up nothing else prosecutors could plausibly use against him. But that, of course, was not the response of Chavez's henchmen. Within days of the broadcast, an investigation against the businessman that had been abandoned was reopened; charges were filed. On June 11, a judge ordered Zuloaga arrested and confined to one of the country's high-security prisons.

US funds Sumate(anti Hugo Chavez)
EXCERPT:
One organization, Sumate, which received a $53,400 grant in September, is organizing the recall referendum against Chávez, Golinger said. The head of another group, Leonardo Carvajal of the Asociación Civil Asamblea de Educación, was named education minister by “dictator for a day” Pedro Carmona, a leading businessman who briefly took over Venezuela during an April 2002 coup against Chávez, she said. A leader of a third group assisted by the National Endowment for Democracy and its subsidiary organizations, Leopoldo Martínez of the right-wing Primero Justicia party, was named finance minister by Carmona, she said.

The Washington Post vs Venezuela
EXCERPTs:
1) Over the years, progressive Venezuela watchers have come to regard Jackson Diehl Op-Eds as a sounding board for the urban legends and gossip promoted by Venezuela’s well-connected opposition leaders--sort of a Page Six for anti-Chavez innuendo. His columns have given mainstream credence to the ideas that the democratically elected president is actually a dictator
2) The same is true for this item:
Now, with a vote on his tenure coming up, the president's prosecutors are back. First up in court was the election-monitoring group Sumate, which has meticulously documented Chavez's manipulation of the electoral system.

Bolivians reject free market
EXCERPT:
Early returns indicated an 80 percent majority in favor of repealing the existing hydrocarbons law pushed in the 1990s by the hated Sánchez de Lozada (or "Goni"), whose political consultants were the star liberal Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and former presidential campaign manager James Carville. The Washington-based Greenberg firm represents British Petroleum, one of the multinationals with billions invested in Bolivia. BP supported the referendum, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as did US Embassy officials, because the possible alternative--an Indian-led revolution--was even worse.

Hillary campaign busted Colombia NAFTA scandal brewing
EXCERPT:
I can't remember a presidential campaign in my lifetime in which the top strategist moonlighted for corporate accounts during the heat of the primaries. The conflict of interest is staggering. Add to that press reports about how former campaign manager Patty Solis Doyle went to Senator Clinton and begged her to fire Penn, but it was Solis Doyle, not the man in charge, that was cut loose as scapegoat for the campaign's ailments.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania there is a factory that employs Americans at union wages. Somewhere in North Carolina and Indiana, too... The "free trade" agreement that Penn was paid $300,000 to shepherd to passage would open the door for the company that owns the factory to move it to a country where if a worker tries to start a union, chances are he or she will be assassinated. The company will be able to get the same work done, in that case, for slave wages, and without any of those pesky environmental, safety and health regulations that protect the worker in Pennsylvania.

The Clintons and Their Sordid Colombia Advocacy
EXCERPT:
How Obama Could Seize Pennsylvania
The Clintons and Their Sordid Colombia Advocacy
By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF

With the Pennsylvania primary fast approaching on April 22, Barack Obama will have the opportunity to end the race for the Democratic nomination once and for all. If he wins by only a slim margin in the state, the "punditocracy" will declare him the presumptive choice of the party and the pressure will build on Hillary Clinton to withdraw. Obama should do well in Philadelphia amongst black voters and will probably pick up a decent percentage of the white affluent vote in the city's suburbs.

In order to clinch the victory, however, Obama will have to make inroads amongst blue collar workers in the more industrial, western section of the state. In Ohio, Obama lost that constituency to Clinton and he's desperate to cut into her lead amongst this critical voting bloc. But with less than two weeks to go, how can he turn things around?

In one word: Colombia.

The Scandal Breaks

Recently, Clinton handed Obama a golden opportunity to sew up the nomination when her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was caught up in a scandal involving the pending free trade deal with Colombia. Bush has been pushing hard for the agreement, which would allow for duty free commerce with the United States. Many Democrats and most unions oppose the initiative because of Colombia's appalling labor record.

Penn's ties to Team Clinton go back some time: the PR man was originally admitted to Bill's circle by consultant Dick Morris in an effort to shore up the 1996 presidential campaign. Penn headed up a global public relations firm called Burson-Marsteller; the company has offered public relations help to such unsavory entities as Blackwater, the security contractor accused of killing Iraqi civilians, and Countrywide, a major lender of risky subprime mortgages.
Penn was employed by the Colombian government to help win passage of the trade agreement in Congress. Penn's ties to the Colombian government were revealed when the Wall Street Journal reported that the PR man held a private meeting with the Colombian ambassador.