New cute bank trick

About two years ago, I took most of my money out of banks, putting it into a local credit union. I'm extremely happy with my credit union, which explains its procedures simply and doesn't hit you with dozens of tricks and traps. Well, maybe I should move my last account from Commerce Bank, a regional bank in the Midwest. Here's the latest trick/trap offered by Commerce. It offers online banking, but Commerce has decided that it will only let you SEE the past 6 months of your transactions online, unless you pay Commerce an extra fee of $6 or $10. Here's the notice that popped up on the Commerce website. You might be thinking what I'm thinking: They already HAVE all of the customer account data . It's not like it costs them anything more to display it ALL. But they would rather that you pay them something for nothing. After viewing the above page on my browser I took the above screen shot. I then tried to move forward by indicating that I would pay $0 for six months of displayed data. That's when I got the error prompt indicating that I still needed to make a "choice." Apparently, "Free" is not a valid choice. I had to log out and back in to circumvent this deceptive screen.

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How the Presidential Debates became almost useless.

At The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald refers to the work of historian George Farah:

He described how the two political parties in the 1990s joined forces to wrest control over the presidential debates away from the independent League of Women Voters, which had long resisted the parties' efforts to shield their presidential candidates from genuine surprise or challenge. Now run by the party-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates, these rituals are designed to do little more than " eliminate spontaneity" and "exclude all viable third-party voices". Citing a just-leaked 21-page "memorandum of understanding" secretly negotiated by the two campaigns to govern the rules of the debates, Farah recounted: "We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated. And instead of making public these contracts and resisting the major-party candidates' manipulations, the commission allows the candidates to negotiate these 21-page contracts that dictate all the fundamental terms of the debates."
What is the result of this behind the scenes usurpation? Greenwald explains:
Here then, within this one process of structuring the presidential debates, we have every active ingredient that typically defines, and degrades, US democracy. The two parties collude in secret. The have the same interests and goals. Everything is done to ensure that the political process is completely scripted and devoid of any spontaneity or reality. All views that reside outside the narrow confines of the two parties are rigidly excluded. Anyone who might challenge or subvert the two-party duopoly is rendered invisible.

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Green Party Candidate for President Arrested for Trying to Enter Debate Venue

From Democracy Now: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and vice-presidential candidate Cheri Honkala were arrested Tuesday as they attempted to enter the grounds of the presidential debate site at Hofstra University. Like other third-party candidates, Stein was blocked from participating in the debate by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties. Stein and Honkala were held for eight hours, handcuffed to chairs. As she was being arrested, Stein condemned what she called "this mock debate, this mockery of democracy." I am outraged that "the debates" only invite candidates from the two financially entrenched parties. Given that this election for President is supposedly important, shouldn't we also be hearing from other candidates from other parties? Although the over-restrictive rules of the current debate system bar them from the debate, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has given them the opportunity to weigh in on the questions asked of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

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Not extricated from Iraq yet

You'll hear many politicians speak as though the U.S. has concluded it's war in Iraq. Not true:

The post-U.S.-withdrawal history of Iraq has had more than its share of debacles as well, most notably the collapse of the U.S. signature police-training program, a multibillion-dollar program the Iraqis said they didn't want... Meanwhile, despite the roughly $6 billion a year operating cost of the massive and heavily fortified embassy, diplomatic relations with Iraq have suffered as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki consolidates power -- by among other things, exiling the country's vice president to Turkey and sentencing him to death. The State Department is consolidating its operations and reducing the number of people it employs in Iraq -- from 16,000 at the beginning of the year, to about 14,000 now, to less than 11,500 by the end of 2013, a State Department official told HuffPost. But because so many foreign service officers and contractors are falling back to the embassy itself, construction on the $750 million compound actually continues, in order to make room for them and maintain the embassy's self-contained infrastructure.
[Emphasis added]. The next time you are wondering why we can't afford to hire enough teachers for our public schools, consider that $6 Billion per year equates to more than $16 Million dollars per day, which (at $50,000 per teacher) is enough to hire 120,000 teachers.

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Matt Taibbi excoriates the media coverage of the presidential election

Time to focus on the terrible "news coverage" of the election. Matt Taibbi nails it:

Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us [members of the news media] suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. . . . Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi excoriates the media coverage of the presidential election