The USA Oligarchy-Austerity-Schadenfreude Thread

[beeline]

^^^^^

Funny, I was going to post that article. The comments below it are unbelievable.

[JackRiddler]

.

Which one? Article, I mean? (Does the number of these circumflex thingies ^ indicate how many posts up?) Oh wait, you must mean the Bunch of Brotherly Love.

The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff. The worse the general conditions and the more criminal the proceedings get, the more they feel compelled to raise their share of the swag, in anticipation of an inevitable-seeming upheaval that never comes. Perhaps the hundred-year bludgeoning of the public mind by the specialists of public relations, education and moral panickry really has killed the target for good, and some of the more shameless rich clearly believe it to be so: Why, although you are screwed, do I CEO quadruple my already million-dollar salary? Because I can -- wouldn't you? Whether they act out of confidence that the working-class mark on the pavement is a corpse, or out of fear that it is a giant soon to awake, the only idea they seem to have left is to keep rifling its pockets and tapping its blood, filching what can be filched.

.

[The Consul]

Funny how the Boiling Frog Teabagger fails to mention the bill is sponsered by gop nutjobs. I mean, it is like a bunch of 6th graders getting together..."I know....I know....let's ask patriotic Ahmurkins to pony up fer the debt. Whatcha think, fellahs? That sound like a good Idear?" Funny how those fruit flies ideology never applies to themselves. Kinda like when W proposed that everyone send a can of food or a $1 bill to the white house to feed the hungry kids in Afghanystan.

[stefano]

[Plutonia]

Visualization of US debt: http://www.wtfnoway.com/

There a WTC7-evoking juxtaposition in the final image.

[vanlose kid]

On The Beach Getting Tan And Sipping Corona, We Got A Monetary Plan-- And It Involves A Lot Of Toner...
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/27/2011 17:29 -0400



First Keynes v Hayek (part one and two), then many, many, many Xtranormal cartoons, now, the latest viral phenomenon is rappers tearing Geithner and Bernanke a new one, gangsta style.



Lyrics:


Raise da debt ceiling!
Raise da debt ceiling!
Raise da debt ceiling!
Raise da debt ceiling!
14 trillion in debt
but yo we ain't got no qualms
droppin $100 bills
and million dollar bombs
spending money we don't have
that's the name of the game
they call me cumulo nimbus
because you KNOW I make it rain
bail out all kind of cars
got all kind of whips
ladies ask me how I get em
I tell em STIMULUS
Social Security surplus?
Oh, guess what? it's gone
I got my hands on everything
like Dominique Strauss Kahn
ain't got no Medicare trust fund
son, that's just absurd
spending every single penny that
we see, son, have you heard?
ain't got no moral objections
ain't got kind of complaints
ain't got no quantitative
statutory budget restraints
so...
[CHORUS]
Yo, we up in the Fed
and we living in style
Spending lots of money
while we sipping crystal
still making it rain
and yeah it be so pleasing
wait, not making it rain--
we be "Quantitative Easing!"
QE1, QE2
QE4, QE3
Dropping IOU's
in every fund that I see
printing the cash
inflating the monies
callin up China
"a-yo we straight out of 20's!"
in the club
we be louding out
while to the market, yeah
we be crowding out
on the beach getting tan
and sipping Corona
we got a monetary plan--
and it involves a lot of toner...
[CHORUS]
So if you look at the chart
and examine the trend
we borrow 40 cents of every
single dollar we spend
and non-discretionary spending
increases every day
do you have a comment for Committee?
I MAKE IT RAIN
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker
would you beam me up?
A Congressperson cutting spending?
Couldn't dream me up
We're gonna default
if we follow this road!
I should have thought of this
14 trillion dollars ago!
I'm the king of the links
I'm a menace at tennis
I'm sticking spinnaz on my rims
picking winnaz in business
if you're looking for some cash
it's about to get heavy
I got some big ol' piles of money
and guess what--they shovel ready
[CHORUS]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/beach-get ... -lot-toner

*

[Bruce Dazzling]

It passed the Senate.

US to avoid default as Senate backs debt ceiling rise
2 August 2011 Last updated at 12:51 ET
BBC

The US Senate has passed a deal struck between Republicans, Democrats and President Barack Obama to increase the US debt ceiling and avert a default.

The bill passed the Senate by 74 votes to 26. Mr Obama is due to speak shortly and then sign the deal into law.

The bill raises the debt limit by up to $2.4tn (£1.5tn) from $14.3tn, and makes savings of at least $2.1tn in 10 years.

The deal was struck after months of fierce negotiations between the White House and lawmakers of both parties.

The vote came roughly 12 hours before Washington was due to run out of time. Without a deal to raise the debt ceiling the US would be unable to meet all its bills, according to the US treasury department.

Before the vote, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell praised the direction of the legislation, saying Congress had "engaged in an important debate" in recent weeks.

"The push-and-pull people saw in Washington this week was not gridlock, it was the will of the people working itself out," Mr McConnell said.

"Together, we have a new way of doing business in Washington," he added.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke after Mr McConnell, saying that though debt deal was not perfect, the US needed to avert the financial disaster that would have been caused by a default.

The legislation passed in the House of Representatives by a clear majority on Monday evening.
Triggers in place

The deal, hammered out over the weekend after weeks of feverish speculation, raises the debt limit by up to $2.4tn (£1.5tn) from $14.3tn, and makes savings of at least $2.1tn in 10 years.

In a key point for President Obama, the bill would raise the debt ceiling into 2013 - meaning he would not face another congressional showdown on spending in the middle of his re-election campaign next year.

The compromise deal deeply angered both right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats.

Liberals have been unhappy that the plan relies on spending cuts only and does not include tax rises, although Mr Obama could still let Bush-era tax cuts for the top brackets expire in January 2013.

House Republicans were displeased that the bill did not include more savings.

Announcing the deal on Sunday evening, President Obama said that, though it was not the one he would have preferred, it was a "serious down-payment" on the US deficit.

The deal would enact more than $900bn in cuts over the next 10 years.

It would also establish a 12-member House-Senate committee charged with producing up to $1.5tn of additional deficit cuts over a decade.

Economists have said that failure to pass the debt deal would have shaken markets around the globe.

[crikkett]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/mugshots/

Mug-Shot Industry Will Dig Up Your Past, Charge You to Bury It Again
By David Kravets August 2, 2011 | 1:52 pm

Ex-con Rob Wiggen gets hate mail daily for running a website that hosts 4 million mug shots. Photo by James Branaman/Wired.com
Philip Cabibi, a 31-year-old applications administrator in Utah, sat at his computer one recent Sunday evening and performed one of the compulsive rituals of the Internet Age: the ego search. He typed his name into Google to take a quick survey of how the internet sees him, like a glance in the mirror.

There were two LinkedIn hits, three White Pages listings, a post he made last year to a Meetup forum for Italian-Americans in the Salt Lake City area. Then, coming in 10th place — barely crawling onto the first page of search results — was a disturbing item.

"Philip Cabibi Mugshot," read the title. The description was "Mug shot for Philip Cabibi booked into the Pinellas County jail."

When he clicked through, Cabibi was greeted with his mug shot and booking information from his 2007 drunk-driving arrest in Florida. It's an incident in Cabibi's life that he isn't proud of, and one that he didn't expect to find prominently listed in his search results four years later, for all the world to see.

The website was florida.arrests.org, a privately run enterprise that siphons booking photos out of county-sheriff databases throughout the Sunshine State, and posts them where Google's web crawlers can see them for the first time. Desperate to get off the site, Cabibi quickly found an apparent ally: RemoveSlander.com. "You are not a criminal," the website said reassuringly. "End this humiliating ordeal … Bail out of Google. We can delete the mug-shot photo."

Cabibi paid RemoveSlander $399 by credit card, and within a day, the site had come through. His mug shot was gone from florida.arrests.org, and his Google results were clean.

"The RemoveSlander site was perfect. It seemed like it was just tailored to the mug-shot site," Cabibi said in a recent telephone interview from Orem, Utah. "I searched 'how to remove mug shots from florida.arrests.org,' and the site was the first result. And I paid."

With that, Cabibi passed through one of the latest niche industries on the web: the mug-shot racket. Exploiting Florida's liberal public-records laws and Google's search algorithms, a handful of entrepreneurs are making real money by publicly shaming people who've run afoul of Florida law. Florida.arrests.org, the biggest player, now hosts more than 4 million mugs.

On the other side of the equation are firms like RemoveSlander, RemoveArrest.com and others that sometimes charge hundreds of dollars to get a mugshot removed. On the surface, the mug-shot sites and the reputation firms are mortal enemies. But behind the scenes, they have a symbiotic relationship that wrings cash out of the people exposed.

Florida.arrests.org is the brainchild of a computer-savvy Florida ex-con named Rob Wiggen. The 32-year-old served three years in federal prison for participating in a small-time credit-card-skimming operation (.pdf) out of a Mexican restaurant in Tallahassee.

When he got out of jail in 2007, he was looking for more legitimate opportunities. Last year he seized on the idea of repurposing the booking photos that Florida police departments are obliged to make public under the state's sunshine laws.

Getting the photos is not completely straightforward: There is no central government repository. Instead, the mugshots and booking details are available on about five dozen different searchable web databases run by local police and sheriff's departments. Wiggen said he wrote screen-scraping software to perform searches on 37 of the counties, crawling to get arrests stretching back years, and continuously polling the sites for new busts, which he scarfs down at a rate of 1,500 a day.

Visitors to his site can comment on the photos, or browse them by tags like "Celebrity," "Hotties," "Trannies," "Tatted up" and "WTF." Most of the photos are of adults, but children as young as 11 are also on display if they're accused of adult crimes.

Wiggen said he wasn't setting out to shame or embarrass anyone: From his point of view, he's getting free content, then monetizing it with Google AdSense banners hawking defense lawyers and bail bondsmen. But the end result is that mug shots that were once hidden behind police CGI search scripts now display in Google searches, often prominently.

Wiggen's own mug shot is noticeably absent from florida.arrests.org. "Of course I'm not going to have my mug on my site," he told Wired.com.

His year-old business has earned him enemies. Wiggen said he receives about 100 angry e-mails, and a few snail-mail letters, every day from people whose booking photos are displayed on his site. "Obviously, they're really nasty," he said of the messages. "I never thought I'd get this backlash from individuals. I just never imagined it."

Among his harshest public critics is the reputation-management company RemoveSlander.com. "Thousands of people are being criminalized by mug-shot websites that collect ad revenue at their expense!" snarls the company's promotional YouTube video, "How To Remove Florida Arrests.org."

"Even defendants whose cases were dismissed are finding their mugs hot on the internet," the company's website adds. "Every time someone clicks on your page to view your mug shots, sites like Florida Arrests earns a little more cash from Google…. We have perfected the art of fighting mug-shot websites."

For $399, RemoveSlander promises to take that fight to florida.arrests.org, and force Wiggen to remove a mug shot. RemoveSlander's owner, Tyronne Jacques — the author of How to Fight Google and Win! — said the removal fee pays for his crack legal team to deal with florida.arrests.org, and to force Google to get the URL removed from Google's search index.

Asked how he accomplishes that, Jacques told Wired.com it was "a trade secret." A recent press release from the company called the work "daunting."

"It can't happen by magic," he said in a telephone interview. "There are legal means that we use…. There is a tremendous amount of work to get the photos down."

Other sites offering the same service are also closed-mouthed about their methods. The site RemoveArrest.com often enjoys advertising right on Wiggen's site through Google's algorithm-driven AdSense program. Joe Ellis, the operator of RemoveArrest.com, said his method is "proprietary," but that he's used it to get "hundreds" of mugs removed at $129 each.

It turns out, though, removing mug shots from florida.arrest.org is not as labor-intensive or arcane a process as the reputation companies claim. The real trade secret is that Wiggen wants a small piece of the action.

Wiggen said he has provided RemoveSlander an URL for an automated takedown script on his site. A PayPal payment of just $9.95 will automatically purge a mug shot from the site. For an expedited removal from Google's index, which Wiggen's code performs through Google's Webmaster tools interface, the fee is $19.90. Wiggen said other removal sites also make use of that same URL, but he declined to name them.

RemoveSlander "presses a button and makes a payment, and my website handles it automatically," Wiggen said.

Wired.com tried the interface independently, and for $19.90 we removed the mugshot of a randomly chosen misdemeanor defendant, which disappeared from the site inside 10 minutes.

Wiggen said about 750 mugs have been removed from florida.arrests.org since he launched the site last year — some of them he took down himself in response to e-mail requests, but most were performed by reputation-management firms like RemoveSlander. He appears content to let those companies take the lion's share of the mug-shot removal profits.

The bulk of florida.arrests.org's income comes from advertising, not mug-shot removal fees, he said, declining to otherwise discuss his revenue. "I'm not getting rich," he said.

The reputation companies, though, appear to be doing pretty well. Of the $399 that Cabibi paid to RemoveSlander, $19.90 would have wound up with the mug-shot site that exposed him in the first place, and $379.10 with the company that promised to "fight" for him. By its own count, RemoveSlander has removed more than 300 mug shots.

Wired.com asked RemoveSlander's Jacques if it's true he's paying $19.90 for his $399 service. That end of the business, he said, was handled by a partner, who was not available to be interviewed. Ellis, the owner of RemoveArrest.com, would neither confirm nor deny his use of the automated takedown tool.

None of this appears to be illegal, but it demonstrates an unintended consequence of state transparency laws — of which Florida's is among the nation's strongest.

"The business model seems to be to generate embarrassment and then remove the source of the embarrassment for a fee," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, and one of the nation's leading open-records advocates.

"So the whole practice is designed to exploit human weakness," said Aftergood. "From an information policy point of view, it is also likely to have adverse consequences. People are more likely to say, 'Who needs it, let's seal all of these records.' That would be an unfortunate consequence."

The State of Florida is unapologetic about the market its mug-shot posts have enabled. "We are very public-record–friendly. We are one of the most transparent states out there," Kristi Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said. "As soon as a photo is taken at a booking facility, it becomes a public record."

Craig Rockenstein, assistant general counsel for the department, declined to discuss the matter. "I've been here 25 years, and that's the first time I was ever asked that," he said.

The sudden ubiquity of mug-shot websites has prompted David Haenel, a Florida criminal-defense attorney, to advise clients to surrender themselves to small town sheriff's departments where bookings are so infrequent that Wiggen and others won't bother scraping their web sites for fresh mug shots.

"I have them go to a county I know they are not scraping the data from," said Haenel, who practices in Sarasota, Florida.

If someone does wind up on florida.arrests.org, though, Haenel will get the photo removed for a $1,250 fee through his own website, hidemymugshot.com. Haenel said he has helped about 25 clients do that in the last two months. He said he doesn't know anything about the $19.90 removal script, and declined to describe how he gets the mug shots removed.

Now $399 poorer, Cabibi said he feels like he's been played.

He said his arrest came during a lapse in judgment, when he drove home intoxicated from a Florida bar after watching college football in 2007. His blood-alcohol was almost double the legal limit. He pleaded no contest, paid a fine and did six months' probation. The Adobe applications administrator thought his past was behind him.

"You know, I did make a mistake back then," he said. "There's a difference between having it available on the county jail website … then to have it return on the first page in Google when you google your name. It seems like … extortion to me."

[Joe Hillshoist]

Wow that was pretty funny.

[barracuda]

If you really liked it, try the sing along version.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Wow. Clearly I don't get out enough cos that was great.

[kenoma]

New Jersey:

[Nordic]

I'm really enjoying this writer lately:

http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2011 ... shoot.html

Shop and Shoot

As published at OpEd News, Dissident Voice and CounterPunch, 8/3/11:

We are being ruled by thespians and gangsters. Far from incompetent, they are lethally good at what they do. They create crisis after crisis, then solve each by sacrificing countless innocents while enriching themselves. Whatever the challenge, domestic or international, their only goals are to gorge and to gouge, so they never fail, actually, even when they miscalculate. They’ll make money blowing things up, and they’ll make even more pretending to fix what they have destroyed. They never pay for their mistakes, only you do, and when they function perfectly, you will still pick up the check, if not bleed. In fact, you will pay even more if they’re in top form.

During this never ending public spectacle, they've introduced us to a cast of rather outlandish characters: a stuttering Texas idiot; a fist bumping, long range shooting and Harvard educated Muslim Commie; a blow job-loving burger clown. Splitting into opposing camps, they’ve climbed into a ring to perform for the whole world. In the front row, a mob of rightish and leftish pundits. These ad-peddling charlatans have parsed each choke slamming and brain busting move as if it was real. Thus, Obama tapped out on canvas. Thus, Obama steam rolled by Republicans. Thus, Obama’s bad bargain. Obama caved in. He no criminal, he weak. Thus, Obama surrendered.

Those who don’t swallow entire these farcical blow by blows are branded nutcases and conspiracy theorists. Whether it’s about 9/11, Bin Laden, Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terror, Iran, Underwear Bomber, BP oil spill, Corexit, Libya, death of Bin Laden, on and on and on, the official narrative is always, and I mean always, nonsense, yet repeated often enough, from all angles, left, right and center, these clumsy fairy tales will coalesce in the brainpans of the inattentive or stupid as uncontestable truths and history.

In spite of all the recent bombast about fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, the wasteful wars continue, though few Americans can tell you why or even where we’re unleashing horror, hatred and sorrow. America must kill because wars are so lucrative. No other country has been fighting so continuously, for so long. Anham, a Northern Virginia company, has just been busted for charging the Pentagon $900 for a $7 control switch, $3,000 for a $100 circuit breaker, and $80 for a $1.41 piece of plumbing equipment. Blah, blah, blah. Tell me something new, why don’t you? And Lockheed Martin has just been given a $72 million contract to install those universally despised irradiating scanners at 300 U.S. airports.

Meanwhile, one in six Americans is on food stamps, and more and more Americans are losing jobs, including teachers, firemen and cops, as unemployed and deranged teens run wild in “flash mobs” to beat up random strangers. It has happened repeatedly in Philadelphia, my neck of the woods, as well as Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Boston, Brooklyn, South Orange and Greensboro. There are racial and class components to this phenomenon, as these wilding youngsters are invariably poor blacks converging on white shopping districts. In the latest episode, an 11-year-old Philly kid was arrested for assaulting a stranger.

With these mobs, all the pathologies of a post-industrial, post productive society, with its dead-end jobs, bad schools and a nonstop, stupefying media, are on full display. Another factor not often cited is the phenomenon of children being raised almost exclusively by strangers, practically right after birth, and the poorer the kids, the crappier the quality of daycare and subsequent schooling. How many times have you seen black women push strollers with well dressed white children, so the rich kids are pampered by their parents and nannies, while the poor ones are left alone in nightmarish neighborhoods. Also, when your government is so openly corrupt, anger is inevitable, although punching a stranger in the face is certainly not a solution. The biggest criminals are out of sight, leaving us bottom feeders to inflict pain on each other.

In any struggle, it’s important to know the nature of your enemy. Is he a klutz, prone to a goofy mistake now and then, or does he have murder on his mind? Again, we are being lorded over by a gang of criminals. War criminals.

For two years, there was a military entertainment complex inside a Philadelphia area shopping mall. At the Army Experience Center, young teens could play shoot them up, blood splattering video games for free, while those over 18 could climb into a realistic mockup of a tank or chopper to massacre bad guys in desert settings, also for free. An advertisement: SHOP FOR SOCKS. GRAB A BITE. PILOT AN AH-64 ATTACK HELICOPTER. After receiving 40,000 visitors and enlisting 236 recruits, the Army decided to shut down this 13-million dollar facility on July of 2010, “It’s been a great success. Basically it’s mission accomplished.”

Though it had planned on opening more of these centers, the Army soon realized there was no longer a need. Thanks to the Mother of All Depressions and rapidly increasing unemployment, desperate Americans are flocking to recruitment stations even without the promise of a free video game. It’s a win, win situation for our military industrial complex: destroy the economy, and Americans will enlist. They will beg to be blown up.

[Nordic]

New Jersey:

Wow! Hadn't seen that. Gee, wonder why, like Wolf Blitzer is gonna show that to America ......

Gotta spread that around ....

[justdrew]

FBI fears sibling criminals on violent rampage
Three siblings from Florida have allegedly opened fire on a Florida State Patrolman’s car and robbed a bank in south Georgia. The FBI is concerned that Ryan Edward Dougherty, 21, Stanley Dylan Dougherty, 26, and Grace Lee E. Dougherty, 29, are on a violent rampage across the south that will only end in multiple deaths. The trio are known to be heavily armed with variety of weapons including assault rifles. They escaped with an undisclosed amount of money from the Certus Bank of Valdosta, Georgia and were last seen driving a white Subaru sedan with New York plates.