More Fuckery

In case you were wondering why 45* has been kind of impatient with "his" generals about Afghanistan, wonder no more.

Raw Story, Sarah Burris:

During a panel discussion on President Donald Trump’s many conflicts of interest, Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump, blasted his financial surplus in the wake of his presidency. 

According to the Financial Times, Blackwater founder Erik Prince — who happens to be Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother — has proposed a two-year plan to supply 5,000 mercenaries and close to 100 aircraft, bringing the total cost of the U.S. effort to turn round a failing war to less than $10 billion a year.

I liked it a lot better when the only guys with private armies were Bond villains.

Yeehaw And Away We Go

Somebody who's better at this than I am would prob'ly find it fairly easy to run it down and make sure, but I'm thinking this is prob'ly a nice little payoff for somebody in Trump's Krony Klatch.

HuffPo:

With what may have been his first presidential order, Donald Trump made it more expensive for working- and middle-class Americans to buy their first homes. The move will increase costs for 750,000 to 850,000 Americans in the next year alone, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The Obama administration had said last week that the Federal Housing Administration would drop the cost of mortgage insurance it sells by almost a third to 0.60 percent. But after Trump took office, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, told lenders the fee cut was off. The reversal of the reduction will mean that homebuyers who borrow $200,000 under the program will see their mortgage insurance fees go up by $500 a year relative to what the Obama administration had ordered, according to figures released by the FHA when the cut was announced.

The reduction was intended to help partially offset the cost of rising mortgage rates and was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 27. The government sells the insurance in case borrowers default.

- and -

Julian Castro, Obama’s HUD secretary, said when the fee cut was announced that the FHA’s reserve fund had grown by $44 billion in the last four years and that it was time to share these gains with borrowers. Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to run HUD, said in his confirmation hearing that he supported undoing the fee cut, and lending trade publications reported that a reversal was likely.

Profits for me and costs for thee.

In Putin's Image

From Bloomberg:

Donald Trump is building a cabinet in his own image. The first billionaire U.S. president has appointed two billionaires and at least nine millionaires, with a combined net worth of about $5.6 billion, to run government departments. Two appointees to cabinet or cabinet-level positions are former generals. And fewer than half have any prior government experience. Many of Trump's nominees have close ties to Wall Street and corporate America. Altogether, his cabinet is shaping up to look a lot different from his predecessors.

The expansive corporate connections, collective wealth and varied policy goals of Trump's cabinet-level picks say a lot about the priorities set to shape his administration. Here are Trump's cabinet nominees so far, in order of their succession to the presidency.

It's interesting - Trump's picks for the various Business Units of the Federal Government are all high-roller CEO types, and his picks for Law Enforcement and National Security are all hardass authoritarian enforcer types. 

So I guess we're seeing the implementation of what the Leftie Loonies have been saying all along - The US is a Private Enterprise Operation with a Militarized Police Force and Nuclear Weapons.

USAmerica Incorporated.

Today's Weirdness

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone from a piece that was posted New Year's Eve:

On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most densely-populated city blocks in America, all eyes will be on the city cops stuck with holiday duty.

Why? Because the New York City Police are in the middle of a slowdown. The New York Post is going so far as to call it a "virtual work stoppage."

Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a "hostile anti-police environment in the city," the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.

If you're wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests "only when they have to." (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

Quick and obvious tho't: "conservatives" have been warning us on social media (eg) about all the bad shit that happens if cops decide not to respond to the public's call for help etc etc etc - which of course sounds more like a threat because..well...because a threat is exactly what it fucking is, but no matter.  What makes me nuts is that these "conservatives" seem so totally oblivious to the fact that the cops are threatening to do exactly what "conservatives" are always saying is exactly what they wanna do, ie: cut back on the reach and the scope and the intrusiveness of Da Gubmint.

Back to you, Matt:

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn't the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

But that's not what's going on here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I'm sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.

I've met more than a few police in the last few years who've complained vigorously about things like the "empty the pad" policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people "when they have to."

Because it's wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it's even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Over the last 25 or 30 years, we've grown allergic to paying for the things we want.  The Wall Streeters and the Glibertarians and that one rapid in-law everybody's got who can't stop agreeing with and then regurgitating everything he hears on DumFux News have been carping loudly about "other people's money" - which is a term of art that's very very VERY familiar to the Criminal Cronies of Commerce because they've been applying that mode of operation to their dirty little deals for as long as there's been the tiniest notion of capitalism.  But now that they've more or less captured The Commons, they're looking to complete the take-over, so they've been trying desperately to make us believe they're talking about saving us by cutting back on taxation (ie: driving down our operating costs yada yada yada), but they're really just shifting the burden.  They're taking that burden off of themselves and their very wealthy benefactors, and putting it on the shoulders of everybody else.  They've pushed for - and we've helped them achieve - a pay as you go system that's evolved to where everything "the lower classes" do on a daily basis is scrutinized to the point where nobody can go more than a coupla blocks away from home without breaking the law in some way, which means they'll be stopped and frisked and ticketed and fined - all in order to pay the cops to protect the 1% from being killed and eaten by the very people who're paying for the privilege of being badgered and extorted and generally fucked over every day.  Welcome to USAmerica Inc.

Sometimes when I hear 'cop', I think 'Sheriff'.  

And when I hear [insert name of locality here],
I think 'Nottingham'.

That one's on me - feel free to print up as many t-shirts and bumper stickers your pea-pickin' little hearts desire.

A Question

...if I may, please.  How come this story gets decent coverage on one of HBO's comedy shows, but not on any of the big network "news" shows?



favorite line: "Apparently, even the cluster fucks are bigger in Texas."

hat tip = Wonkette

Larry Wilkerson

"...the invisible hand of Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations" is not an invisible hand - it's now the hand of oligarchs..."

One of the great mysteries of the colossal cluster fuck known as the George W Bush administration is that (apparently) nobody was listening to Larry Wilkerson.

Or was it that Larry wasn't speaking quite as clearly then as he is now?  Dunno, but we'd better start listening to him now if we're to have any real chance of stickin' around long enough to find out.

Anyway, from The Real News:

Internet Freedom

Lee Camp

A Small Win

...or maybe that should be the word 'win' spelled with the lower case 'w'(?)

From Addicting Info:

The full body scanner technology, which produces a semi-nude image of a persons body, has been controversial since they were first introduced. While the advocates for it called the scanners safe, that the images were not clear enough to be considered intrusive, privacy advocates have taken, at times, odd measures to protect the scanners.

What has been neglected in much of the media attention, however, is the safety of these scanners. The radiation used by the models of machines built by OSI Systems has been called into question, with serious concerns about the levels of dosage used. Late last year, OSI failed to meet critical safety requirements, and on Friday, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) announced their termination of the OSI contract. While OSI is not the sole supplier, its systems were under the most scrutiny due to the clarity and detail they provided.

So first, chalk one up for even a slight delay in stomping all over people's rights - of course, with one contractor out, it only makes things better for somebody else's brother-in-law to become very wealthy at taxpayer expense while doing practically nothing effective about the problems of terrorism.

Second, it's kinda nice to know that an opportunistic slug like Mike Chertoff is being left on a dry sidewalk under a scorching summer sun.