the moil and the glory

who cannot help but continue to be astonished at the money making schemes monster, mobster banks have concocted and arranged for themselves, their enrichment and the proles' further diminishment?  i know i can't.  this latest bit 'bout that fukkin jpmuthafukkinmorgan slurpin' fees off unemployment insurance recipients and people on food stamps. how's that free market workin' out for the yewwwnightidstates?

States found it cheaper to outsource these services. By switching to debit cards for food stamps and other benefits, states save millions of dollars in processing and administrative fees.

Companies, including JP Morgan, filled the niche. For a fee, the bank will provide debit cards to benefit recipients. Each month, they will load money onto the cards and on a daily basis process transactions at stores.

For unemployment insurance, the providers also process ATM cash withdrawals.

For instance, in Michigan, JP Morgan allows unemployment recipients two free withdrawals from its network of ATMs. For each addition withdrawal, the bank takes a $1.50 fee. If somebody loses their card, the first replacement is free. The second costs $7.50.

The banks also get a fee for each case they handle.

Take Indiana. JP Morgan gets 62 to 64 cents for each food stamp case handled monthly there. With 296,245 cases right now, that means the state is paying JP Morgan $183,672 a month on top of any other fees it collects.

on top of any other fees, it says. which would imply that the meat of the scam is "the fees it collects." And those are not to be sniffed at. bankster fees are what drove the mortgage bubble.

foreign direct investment

sirota's over there, yowling 'bout the usual, and one upchuck popped out that made me fucking laugh my ass off.

the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fiercely lobbied against the "Buy America" provisions ...

just think about that for a long deep moment.  savour the juxtapose of the US Chamber of Commerce, commerce ferfuksakes! yowling that no american should be asked, let alone enticed, to buy american made stuff.  which would tend to suggest that the chamber of commerce is one not so much "US" as it of ... well, some other entity whose kraken hand twirls supplicating political midgets, pummels all else.

didn't see a thing

readin' Streatfield's lang zang about those long forgot missing explosives us mil forces failed to secure back in those chaotic days of iraq invasion yore.  there's black humour in the story of the locals makin' off with scads of stuff from saddam's depot at Qa'qaa.  it's a fun and awful tale (this is, of course, preferred here, fun and awful). us mil nowhere to be seen.  mountains of shit movin' out, trucks, cranes lifting shit, water pipes dug up.  quite a bit of activity, one surmises.

101st Airborne camped a couple a klicks so'east of the motherfreakinlode of PETN, RDX, and HMX at Qa'qaa, jets n' copters flyin' in 'n out, and no one sees the industrial scale, flea market bootlegging of Qa'qaa.  not one freakin' us eyeball. well, maybe some did, but were told that it was "not on the list."  no one even seemed to know about the place.  locals knew.  and they were having a ball!  set up a bazaar right in the weapons mill compound.   Donald Rumsfeld, as he is wont to do, applied his drill down logic to conclude that such looting could not have happened, precisely because the aforementioned "bit of activity" had never been seen by those keen us eagle eye.  and when rumsfeld concludes, well, that's the end of that.

"Picture all of the tractor trailers and forklifts and caterpillars it would take. We had total control of the air. We would have seen anything like that."

Yes! yes, do picture it!

Hundreds of Yusifiyans were roaming around inside. They were gutting the place. Some targets were easier than others. Trucks vanished fairly quickly. The first few were simply hotwired and driven away. When locals realised there was no rush, however, they became more brazen, using the stolen trucks to return and carry away further loot. The next day they came back for more. "Lathes, machine tools, electrical generators," says Haki. "They were even taking the iron posts from the buildings." Qa'qaa was assaulted from all sides. From the north-west came the Yusifiyans; from the north-east, the inhabitants of Mahmudiyah.

Mahmudiyans were operating a market inside the walls, selling and bartering plundered goods. Ali, the site administrator, was flabbergasted at the scale of the operation. "It was astonishing, the way they managed to steal such big pieces of kit. Some of them were using cranes." He shakes his head. "They even took the electrical cables. They dug them up from the ground and took them. The water pipes. Everything."

wonder if this is one of those known unknowns rummy loved so much.  we know we have not seen looting, and, because we are so great, we know we should have seen looting, therefore no looting occurred.  or is that an unknown known?  fuck, who knows? what is known is that, when rummy is reasoning, there's a whole lotta "un"s in front of  his "known"s.

what seems worse in all this is that the jokers had no idea about the place, didn't seem to care.  as was the theme of the bush years, they were warned about the stockpiles of explosives at Qa'qaa.  nuthin'.  the goop went onto to blow up american troops. this would rank an order of magnitude greater in worseness as far as pentagon support for insurgencies goes.  hell, in the 'ghan'stan, they only indirectly funnel hundreds of millions to the talibaners.  in iraq, they more or less handed the insurgency the matériel directly, in situ.  didn't even have to haul the tonnes of shit in. 40,000 tonnes of shit, that is.

naturally, the response was, well, an election time response: deny, deflect, bullshit (see rumsfeld). nope, wasn't us.  saddam! that bastard.  did it to make us look bad.  the Times spews satan's raw seed, and the IEA is full communists who hate america.

however, the conclusion one must draw here is that the united states does not need saddam hussein to make them look bad.  happily, and also right before the election, osama's tape popped up.  that the incompetence and disregard of the us military was resulting in lethal attacks on us military forces was a story cast adrift amidst the fictive brane of the american corporate media universe, as hamster attentions probed the deep political impact of Osama's video tape right before the election.  beltway belly burblers* (the BBB) consensus ruling was that videotape was proof, not that Bush had failed to bring in bin Laden, but rather that the constantly gawdblessuhd yewwwnited states just needed more Bush.  bush wasn't a failure.  the problem was america had not fully embraced bush's vision. america just needed more of him, and then things would get better.  when something's not working, if it's killing Americans, fuck! more of it!

it's the american political way.



* beltway belly burblers.  var: bbb, var type: `str', descr: bbb content is potentially unlimited, though considered highly redundant.  type `str'  (IIRC spec, min size:  65535 bytes) is considered more than sufficient to capture Washington "prevailing wisdom."

bum's rush

so ol' olbermannic got the boot ex-post effseesee approved comcast/nbc merger agreement.  kerplunk!  over in dumdumville, apparent bafflement is rife.

bob breaks it down:

Now, with Olbermann’s permanent departure on Friday, the remainder of MSNBC’s liberal evening line-up, which also includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell (who will fill Olbermann’s 8 p.m. slot), must face the reality that any sustained friction with management could mean the bum’s rush for them, too.

bend over or fuck off.

premeditated absquatulation

tonne and a haffa gold ferfucksakes. now that's some absquatulatin'!

La famille du président déchu Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali s'est-elle enfuie de Tunisie avec 1,5 tonne d'or ? C'est la supposition de l'Elysée, qui se fonde sur des recoupements des services secrets français.

Selon eux, Leïla Trabelsi, la femme du président, se serait rendue à la Banque centrale de Tunisie chercher des lingots d'or. Le gouverneur aurait refusé et demandé un ordre écrit. Mme Ben Ali aurait appelé son mari, qui aurait d'abord lui aussi refusé, puis cédé. "Il semblerait que la femme de Ben Ali soit partie avec de l'or", explique un responsable politique français. "1,5 tonne d'or, cela fait 45 millions d'euros", poursuit-il.

Précision d'un conseiller de l'Elysée : "L'information vient essentiellement de source tunisienne, en particulier de la Banque centrale. Cela a l'air relativement confirmé."

A la banque centrale de Tunisie, on dément l'information. "Je n'ai reçu aucun ordre verbal ni écrit de sortir de l'or monétaire. Notre stock d'or n'a pas bougé", assure au Monde Maaledj Habib, directeur général de la caisse générale, des comptoirs et des systèmes de paiements.

More ...

the right stuff

readin' on at gupta's sermon 'bout the genetics of the "American Right,", what with them bein' crazy 'n all.  and a damned good thrashing it is.  always love that, a damned good thrashing.  someone else's ass, of course.

so there he's goin' on, yowling away 'bout the "extreme Right," and their hate-filled gobs, pustular and sulfurous as they are.  denies the us is fascist yet fears america is swirling in the vortex of a "proto-fascistic moment" craved by those who seek

"a hierarchical society based on mythologized notions of traditional identity – are allied with a section of capital and are increasingly willing to use violence to achieve their aims.

at this point gupta is speaking on a more parochial level,  those demons seeking all that horrible sounding stuff, but damn if that ain't the best summation of the freaking united states in toto that i have ever seen. marvelously succinct and perfectly accurate. it's certain that gupta worded it in precisely this way as demonstration.

this isn't just the us, of course, but any bloody-minded imperial enterprise. however, the inception of the us as an artifice of this weltanschauung clearly demonstrates that her own self-declared tradition would be to seize by force of arms and armed presence. exceptional and without peer, hatched from outrages against property and a violent womb, america shot forth, quite literally, with a full throttled lust for more, and an altruistic pretext to back it up. with the founding of the country, more was taken.  america begot american westering.  they were "willing to use violence to achieve their aims."

still are, current evidence suggests.  no generalized westering anymore, now.  globalisation fucked that all up.  us stratop vectors are all over the place now -- full spectrum dominance --  arctic, up in space, zippin' in on Colombia, jiggling Chavez, missile defense shields popping up in countries that don't want them, all over the the freaking place. encircle everyone. spooks and milcons cruising around Somalia, Sudan, Congo, this and there, who knows what's going which way?

so, no, there is no longer any generalized march west by the civilising forces of Anglo-Teutonic DNA.  into afghanistan, from the wrong way it must be pointed out, is surely a fool's errand and verily spells doom for such a clearly misdirected Teutonic march of civilisation.  goin' backwards like that.  can't imagine teddy would be at all happy about a Teutonic march headin' off east around the world.  that's wrong, for some reason.  so, that means, it's doomed.  who can argue with that?

ol' guppers goes on to say that he is addressing the "reactionary right," which tends toward suggesting that the policies of the united states of america are those of  a "reactionary right."  which does not seem entirely beyond nominal cognizance.

when you've got a country that has been run by various civilized gentlemen with Teutonic-Aryan race-civilizing mythologies dominating their policy thinking, "reactionary right" seems a tad mild a label.

gorgonzola

ha! the ol big ol' hairy eye balls at the 'gon gone 'n gots themselves a big ol' new hairy eye ball for the 'ghan'stan, some flyin' monster camcorder that can see "an entire town" or "everything," where pentagon rhetoric compresses "everything" into the proximate theatre of operations of a town in afghanistan. big thinking, on small scale, as pee-arr hacks might say.

anyway, this new monster vid-dumper has got the boys all shivery. they will be able to see "everything." and will then blow what they think they don't like the fuck up. the dumbass/mod-tech combo; ripe for killing time.

penta-nowhere-near-gon calls this wondrous addition to the arsenal of ever more cogent lethality the "gorgon stare." well, i must say, that is an improvement over the xtian trending morphology of the us armed forces. pagan references. whew. somewhat of a relief. take that, you xtian fundy mil-infiltratin'fucks.

of course, not really. the american gorgon stare is just the red dot of death and dismemberment, the ocular services of which are rendered unto an entirely unwholesome band of murderous cretins who see themselves as creators.