A Spike in the Polls for the President?

President's Approval Rating Soars After Punching Wall Street Banker in Face

WSJ- A Once Decent Newspaper

Now a Murdoch-owned piece of shit, they've been caught rigging their circulation figures and running favorable stories about one of the companies that was helping the WSJ to artificially inflate its circulation numbers.

Apparently somebody in the WSJ found out about it and alerted upper management and was almost immediately fired.

Career Limiting Move

A really good career-limiting move, especially in the military, is for your command to have a problem and your bass has to read about it in the press (dead-tree or on-line).

Which is how the Air Force brass found out about a keylogger virus that has infected their drone control systems.

Somebody's head's gonna roll for that alone.

Bank Transfer Day

November 5th. There is a Facebook page. The idea is to take your money out of Bank of America, Chase Bank, Citibank, Wells Fargo (among others) and deposit it in credit unions (or local banks). The Fifth of November was chosen to match up with Guy Fawkes's Day, but hell, there is no reason to wait.

Vote with your feet and your wallets. Fuck those guys, move your money!

There is the funny thing: One of the big winners in this will probably be USAA, for they offer free checking, free debit cards and free use of any ATM, up to ten times a month.

What's funny is that USAA started out as the United Services Automobile Association, an auto insurance company for military officers, retirees and their families. (I've been a member for decades.) USAA then expanded into financial services and for that, they'll serve anyone. For car insurance, you still have had to have some tie to the armed forces, though it's no longer limited to offices.

So it's pretty safe to assume that finding a Democrat in the upper management of USAA would be a rare event. And it's not exactly conservatives that are going to push the "Fuck the Banks" movement.

(H/T)

Hell, I'd Vote For Her

(H/T)

UPDATE: From the comments, what she really said:

Reason #17,357 Why We Should Guillotine All of the Banksters

Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) will pay $11 million to ousted executives Joe Price and Sallie Krawcheck, a large payout at a time when banks face protests over pay but smaller than the eight-figure packages some executives received before the financial crisis.

Krawcheck -- a former Citigroup Inc (C.N) executive who came to Bank of America in 2009 and was one of the top-ranking women on Wall Street -- will receive a one-time payment of $5.15 million, according to separation agreements filed by the bank on Friday.

Price, a Bank of America veteran, gets $4.15 million. Each will also receive $850,000 over a one-year period.

And that is why we hate your guts, as was so eloquently explained here. One clown comes to work for BofA, stays there for two years and walks away with severance pay of over five million clams? Shit fire, even at a generous company, the severance for two years of service might have been four weeks of pay.

This is what the plutocrats have yet to understand: People are becoming fed up. People are realizing that the game is rigged. The Federal government stepped in to bail out the banks, who have, in turn, done nothing other than turn the screws down tighter on Americans. The banks have done little to remedy their fuckery during the mortgage mess, other than trying to back-date and forge documents.

The banks got bailed out. They repaid the bail-out money with other money that they borrowed from the Federal government-- money to help homeowners and businesses. The banks have done nothing to help anyone, only themselves.

Wall Street is, itself, rigged by large institutions, including the banks, trading by computer. They have orchestrated massive swings of the market by sending in huge trade orders and then canceling them. The banks and the big brokerages make a shitload of money, but any schlub trying to trade for himself is hopelessly behind the times. Not that any of this is really new, that's pretty much was Enron did to screw all of the utility customers out west ten years ago.

It is starting to sink in, slowly, that the plutocracy has enriched itself at the expense of the poor and the middle class. It is starting to sink in that is why the middle class has pretty much been going in slow reverse for the last forty years.

Slowly, people are starting to call "bullshit" on the rich. When someone like Mitt Romney sets up a group that takes over companies, runs them into the ground, strips the assets, fires the workers and then sets up factories in China, they are not "job-creators". They are pirates.

Their role in the American economy is not defensible. That's why they have stooges like Eric Cantor, who loved the Tea Party demonstrations, calling the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as "mobs". They have to throw words around like "communist" and "socialist", because they cannot honestly and morally defend what they have done to this country.

But Michael Bloomberg has finally wised up and he has come to realize that trying to put down the Occupy Wall Street demonstration won't work. (By the way, don't be fooled by what Bloomberg says about tolerating protests, for he was the mayor when the NYPD was conducting mass arrests of innocent pedestrians during the 2004 GOP convention.)

Here is your choice, pirates/plutocrats: You can use the protests as a reason to enter into a discussion, now, and talk about giving back some of what you have looted. You can admit that it really isn't fair that hedge fund bosses get taxed at 15%. You can come to the realization that maybe Muffy and Biff and Paris and the other trust fund babies also should pay more in taxes.

You can stop treating your fellow citizens as if they were cattle to be slaughtered for your table. You can stop shuttering American factories and stop throwing hundreds of thousands of good people out of work, only so you can increase your profit from 12% to 18%. You can stop giving the CEOs who fire thousands of people huge bonuses. Crimus, how much more money do you need?

Or you can do what you have been doing: Get your butt-monkeys on Capitol Hill and on Fox News and on Meet the Press to continue to vilify the poor and the middle class and the rest of the 99% in this country. You can try to do that and the anger will continue to build. It will get to the point that the pirates/plutocrats who enrichen themselves by slashing the jobs and pay of thousands of Americans and who have hollowed out American industry in the race for even more wealth will come to be seen as being merely selfishly greedy and treacherously unpatriotic.

And then we shall see.

Wrong Again, Jerry Brown

Gov. Jerry Brown announced early Monday that he had outlawed the open carrying of handguns in public in California, a controversial practice that top law enforcement officials had denounced as dangerous.
...
"I listened to the California police chiefs," Brown said in a statement.

Bad move, Jerry, you gutless weasel.

Police chiefs are the wrong people to listen to on almost any subject that I can think of. Police chiefs, especially large city chiefs, are about as solid an anti-freedom, anti-liberty and pro-statist group that exists.

Police chiefs have fought every concealed-carry bill that I know of. Police chiefs would happily see a law passed that would nullify the Fourth Amendment.

Piles and Piles and Piles of Cash; Why Things Won't Get Any Better

The banksters are sitting on huge piles of cash. Over a trillion dollars worth.

That's cash that could be used to grow the economy by financing industrial expansion. That's cash that they got from us for economic development and they are not lending it out. They are just sitting on it. Because at nearly 0.00% interest, it costs them nothing to hold it.

The economy is stalled and the banksters are a significant reason why it is stalled.

(H/T)

Speaking of trillions of dollars pounded down rat holes, one of the results of Bush's "Remake Iraq Project" has been to create a state that is cozying up with brutal dictators who have a penchant for slaughtering their own people.

More than six months after the start of the Syrian uprising, Iraq is offering key moral and financial support to the country’s embattled president, undermining a central U.S. policy objective and raising fresh concerns that Iraq is drifting further into the orbit of an American arch rival — Iran.

Mission accomplished, O Dorquemada!

OWS: Better Reporting Than You'll See in the NYT

There is a bit of self-congratulation in this piece, but it's merited, as the writer did far better work on the OWS protests than any of the newspaper stories that I've seen.

Elsewhere, Robert Samuelson has a "pity the poor rich" piece in the Washington Post, which is worth reading for laughs. It's a fine example of how to fudge with statistics, for he parrots the line that "the rich pay a lot of taxes." Yeah, so what? Let's look at that, shall we?

A hedge fund operator who takes home a billion a year is taxed at fifteen percent, because they construe it as "income on long-term investments", not pay. Yes, 15% of a billion is a lot of money, $150 million. But if that were taxed as wages, even at the current low tax rate for the rich, he'd have to pay $350 million. At fifteen percent, he's paying less taxes, as a percentage of income, than somebody who makes $36,000.

It's not the amount that's important, it's the percentage. Say Mr. Hedge Fund buys a sports car and goes speeding down the highway, and does 90mph in a 65mph zone. Between the fine and court costs, that'll run him maybe $350, plus his insurance will go up because he'll lose his "safe driver" discount.

$350 is probably a lot of money for you. It is for me. But for Mr. Hedge Fund, hell, $350 probably doesn't cover his wine bill for dinner. His bookkeeper will probably write the check after Hedgy throws the ticket at her and tells her to pay it.

Now say that the speeding fines were based on income, and say that you made $35,000 last year. Let's set the fine for driving at 25mph over the limit at 1% of income. You get dinged for going 90 in a 65 zone, you'll pay $350. Still hurts, right? That ticket would cost ol' Hedgy ten million bucks.

Care to bet that now he'll pay close attention to his speed?

This is why the apologists for the wealthy, like Samuelson, are so wrong. It's not the amount that matters, it's the percentage. And when the rich are paying less, as a percentage of their income, than secretaries and truck drivers, something is seriously wrong with the tax code.

Update: Got a mention in memorandum. I think that's a first for this blog.

Learn How to Shoot a Rifle in NYC!

The Appleseed Project is conducting two rifle training sessions, right in Manhattan, on Nov. 11-12 and Dec 9-10. If you live in NYC and you've never ever even touched a gun in your life, you might want to check it out. You could have a lot of fun.