Today's Banking Fuckery

Esquire's Charlie Pierce:

At this point, if you told me that Wells Fargo was running dope out of Marseilles, and responsible for the unsolved murder of Roger Rabbit, I’d probably believe you. Seriously, this latest malfeasance alleged against the company, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and relayed to the shebeen via The New York Daily News, is further proof that this particular respected financial institution is about three fedoras short of being the Gambino family.

The bank overcharged their corporate clients on foreign exchanges and levied hefty transactions fees through ingrained practices that rewarded employees for raking in the cash, according to a Wall Street Journal report. If the companies questioned why the foreign exchange rates were higher than the ones they were initially offered by the bank, employees would simply chalk it up to the “time fluctuation,” saying the market rate changed by the time the transaction was executed, one former manager said. Companies were also charged unusually high fees for currency conversions — which employees blamed on the bank’s “automated” computer system.

But hey - who needs that silly ol' CFPB anyway.

Today's Quote

“We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”

― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Week 54 In 45*land

Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.
Hi-lites from Amy Siskind, November 25, 2017:

11. On Monday, acting DHS director Elaine Duke announced the Trump regime would not extend special deportation protection known as Temporary Protected Status for 59K Haitians here since the 2010 earthquake.

16. On Wednesday, the WSJ reported Trump’s DOJ has opened an investigation into Harvard’s admission practices, citing similar allegations in a 2014 case, and said the university is not cooperating with the probe.

17. The DOJ is investigating Harvard’s diversity policies under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin for organizations that receive federal funding.

18. Betsy DeVos’ Education Department is considering limiting the scope of civil right investigations at schools, to only look only at the specific incident and not focus on “systemic” or institutional issues.

19. Juli Briskman, the cyclist who got fired by her employer in Week 52 for giving Trump the middle finger, has raised $124K from more than 5.5K sponsors on a GoFundMe page set up by one of her friends.

22. Daily Beast reported, based on public records, 20 family members have landed jobs in the Trump regime. Also, not since the Kennedy’s have so many blood-relatives occupied so many prominent roles.

31. POLITICO reported Trump’s lead pick to run the Census Bureau, Thomas Brunell, a Texas professor who is the author of a book which claims competitive elections are bad for America, is causing alarm.

Today's Pix

Click a pic to start the show

Today's GIF

My sentiments exactly - increasingly so these last 12 or 15 months.

Keith

In a kind of Farewell Address - Keith is done now - and when the 45* portion of this nightmare has passed, we can start looking for opportunities to "Make America America Again".

Today's Daddy State

The Rat-Fucking never ends.

WaPo:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

Think about how often we hear about "false flag" attacks or operations.  Once you've made the accusation - and doesn't really matter who you've thrown it at - once you've accused somebody of something, it's harder for anybody to accuse you of the same thing.

Daddy State Rule #1:

Every accusation is a confession

Danica Roem

First time an out Trans Woman got elected to any state legislature - here's a tweet thread from Danica Roem:

Since the election, I've repeatedly heard these Republican talking points about why they lost, basically making Democratic voters out to be too dumb to vote Republican and caring too much about identity politics. At risk of giving them good ideas, let me break this down.

I spent 10 months detailing my plan to fix #Route28: how much it would cost ($300M), how to pay for it (reallocating 28-66 funds), what it would look like (replace traffic lights with overpasses) & how I would get it done (local+state). Y'all hit me on "transgenderism."

At the state level, y'all made a pediatrician who volunteers at a children's hospice out to be a member of MS-13 and campaigned throughout the state on Confederate statues and fiscally reckless tax cuts your own state senators called BS. And you wonder why you lost?

Here in Manassas, @carterforva and I talked relentlessly about jobs. Roads. Schools. Health care. Equality. I know this because Lee and I saw each other on the stump constantly. And y'all went after us for and "teaching transgenderism to kindergartners" and "socialism."

When you spend an entire year just trying to make people afraid of people in their community and you apply this asinine labels as if you're trying to make people afraid of an ideology or an idea, then you're neglecting the very basics of governing to divide our communities.

Look at the BS the Democrats in PWC had to put up with from y'all this year. Racism. Xenophobia. Transphobia. When I went on offense in my TV ad, I had a first-person testimonial from someone in PWC who your policies left uninsured. You hit me for my band and my gender.

Bottom line: Knock off the divisive BS and actually campaign on boring stuff like infrastructure because it's the boring stuff that the people pay you with their tax dollars to work on so they don't have to focus on it. That's literally your job. Try doing it.

One more thing: Stop believing your own headlines. I knew beyond a shred of doubt we would win this race when y'all actually, sincerely thought based on a POS robo poll that 27% of Dems wouldn't vote for me if they knew I'm trans. 1) Wrong. 2) Stop attacking trans people.

And I understand how so many people could get pretty confused as to what leadership looks like and sounds like - in case you were at all unclear on that, you just read a pretty good little primer.

Charlie Pierce

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine:

The outrage against the piece was quick and volatile and, in truth, the story is a mess, as Fausset himself admitted in a very strange essay that ran virtually simultaneously to the story, the very existence of which leads the careful observer to conclude that the editors at the Times knew the story was a mess and told Fausset to cover the newspaper’s hindquarters.
The NYT's piece that sounded lot like normalization of America's Nazis drew a lot of fire (not undeserved IMO)

We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Every reporter has stories they wish they could have back. (It would be a shame if the inhabitants of this shebeen would Google some of the stuff I wrote about John Edwards back in the day.) But a newspaper is a collaborative effort. It is the job of editors to recognize when a story isn’t there—and especially so if, as Lacey claims, the story goes through multiple drafts and it still isn’t there, and especially so, as in this case, the paper has the reporter write an explainer about how the story wasn’t there. 

Pro tip, lads: if you send a guy out on a story like this in 2017, and he can’t come up with anything that Hannah Arendt didn’t say better in 1951, it really is time to move along. Anything else is flat dangerous. Ask Herbert Hoover if he'd like that speech back.

Fouling The Nest

WaPo:

The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day, 10 times the amount a century ago, according to World Bank researchers. If nothing is done, that figure will grow to 11 million tons by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much. It’s difficult to find comparable figures for the trash produced by mega-cities. But clearly, New York generates by far the most waste of the cities I visited: People in the broader metropolitan area throw away 33 million tons per year, according to a report by a global group of academics published in 2015 in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s 15 times the Lagos metropolitan area, their study found.

With a sharp increase in the world population and many economies growing, we are producing more waste then ever. In Europe and the United States our trash is largely invisible once it’s tossed; in other parts of the world it is more obvious, in the form of waste dumps, sometimes in the middle of cities.

Dumps are a problem because they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Burning trash outdoors is also harmful, to the environment and people’s health.

Change is scary. Especially when the people in positions to make decisions have built their careers on doing things a particular way.

Nothing good happens quickly enough unless we figure out how to sell the corporations on making the changes - and do that without having to wait for the usual effects of pain and difficulty to motivate those decision-makers.

Today's WTF

Assuming we survive this full-on frontal assault against self-government (an obvious attempt to finish installing the mechanisms of USAmerica Inc) it's going to take a good long time to sort thru all the shit.

45* is:

• a foul-mouthed pussy-grabbin' lyin' sack o' shit - supported by Evangelical Christians
• a draft-dodging puffed-up tin-plated strutting martinet who claims the US military is hollow and ineffectual - supported by people in uniform almost across the board.
• a NYC huckster who's in bed with Crooked Rentiers on Wall Street and Russian money launderers - supported by farmers and millions of other plain old work-a-day people who're the first to get fucked over by his "policy" choices

This confusion as to why the good people are still down with the clown is global.

Julia Manchester, The Hill (eg)

The head of the Church of England, the archbishop of Canterbury, said in an interview on Sunday that he doesn't understand why President Trump enjoys such broad support among Christian fundamentalists. 

"There's two things going through my mind: do I say what I think, or do I say what I should say?" Justin Welby said in an interview with ITV. "And I'm going to say what I think."

"I really genuinely do not understand where that is coming from," he said of Trump's support among Christian fundamentalists.

Defending The Indefensible

Kyle Mantyla, RightWingWatch - here's a quick look and a clip from a radio talk show in Alabama:

Extremist anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ activist Flip Benham was among the Religious Right activists who gathered in Alabama last week to defend Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore amid multiple reports that Moore had pursued sexual relationships with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Yesterday, Benham was interviewed by Alabama radio hosts Matt Murphy and Andrea Lindenberg on their “Matt & Aunie” show about the press conference and the allegations against Moore, and to say that the interview was a debacle would be an understatement.


These radio poodles are not exactly raving lefty loonies. So there's (apparently) some real resistance to this Roy Moore clown. And it'll be interesting to see how the exit polls shake out.

The Nazi Next Door

NYT put up a piece by Richard Fausset that everybody seems to think is "normalizing" Nazis. Kinda hard to disagree with that.

Here's a look:

HUBER HEIGHTS, Ohio — Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

Nice try, NYT.  But you fucked it up. Again.

Here's a piece from James Hamblin at The Atlantic, mocking the Times as they just "put this out there and let you guys see for yourselves how awful it is that Nazis are just like everybody else":

“What can I say,” jokes Stevenson, as he sees me taking note of the spice rack. “I like garlic powder.”

We both chuckle. The shimmering evening sun glints off the porcelain saltshaker and casts a long shadow onto the linoleum. As I follow its path, his wife Stephanie appears in the kitchen doorway, an exasperated look on her face.

“You forgot to put the toilet seat down again,” she says, rolling her eyes and pulling her phone out of her back pocket. Stephanie is pretty. Her hair is saffron and flaxen, and she wears jeans also, and she has a wry smile.

Stephanie Stevenson is followed by a normal dog, who walks into the room with a slight limp, and Stephen pets it. He leans in.

“The Jews control all the money, and the world would be better off if they were dead,” he says, petting the dog. “Who’s a good boy?”

The question is rhetorical. I ask about the wallpaper.

Some people disagree with Stevenson’s political views.

“He’s a nice enough guy,” said the local grocer, Butch Tarmac, a registered Democrat. “He buys apples and pancake mix. I also like those things. But I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the bit about the one true race cleansing the soil and commanding what is rightfully theirs.”

Dreamtime Timeline

The bingo card is likely to expand by leaps and bounds - and I think we'll have plenty of candidates, cuz there's probably a whole battalion of these assholes we don't even know about right know. 

THREAD - Update on the next set of Mueller indictments.

1) Tea Pain has been preachin' to you lately about the importance of the Papadopoulos indictment. MSNBC now reports that PapaD turned on 4 other members of Trump Nat Security team.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

2) Coincidentally, there are 4 sequentially numbered unsealed indictments in the D.C. federal court between the Manafort and PapaD indictments, except Tea Pain don't believe in coincidences.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

3) Remember, PapaD was a "proactively cooperatin'" witness for Mueller, wearin' a wire. Another news report confirmed a member of Trump's Nat Security was caught lyin' to the FBI. Most likely more fruit from the PapaD arrest.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

4) Let's do the math. Flynn has flipped and is providin' dirt big time on the big fish, particularly Jared Kushner. So the next round of indictments will look something like this...

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

5) ...The average American is a good, decent person that will not tolerate Trump's conspiracy with Russia. The national conscience will quickly turn against Trump.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

6) Trump will naturally handle this pressure horribly and quickly turn the heart of the nation against him.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

7) When Mueller blows his next Trumpet, hold tight, because things will start happenin' fast and furious. The Trump administration will self-destruct with a mighty noise. Mueller is about to chain the devil and cast him into the abyss. <eot>

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 25, 2017

Trae Crowder

"Happy holidays - sorry everything sucks."