Now isn’t that a deceptive headline!

Because of course Wachovia charged the drug cartels a lot of money to launder $378 billion for them.

“No charges” only applies to the legal consequences of laundering $378 billion for drug-lords.

Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.

That sounds like a very serious crime to me, especially when you consider that…

Bill Clinton is prominently quoted in Paul Krugman’s recent column about “structural unemployment.”

For example, former President Bill Clinton recently told an interviewer that unemployment remained high because “people don’t have the job skills for the jobs that are open.”

Krugman refutes this nonsense in one line.

Unemployment has surged in every major occupational category.

So there is no category of “job skills” that would equip millions of workers for millions of jobs that don’t exist.

But debating sold-out hures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama about public policy is beside the point.

Neither of those narcissists ever gave a damn about the public, and the bottom line was always “What’s good for me is good enough for the country.”

Since Bill Clinton left the White House, he has collected more than $100 million in deferred bribes from his grateful corporate clientele, after eight years of nonstop de-regulation and runaway mergers and acquisitions.

More than $100 million in earnings!

And the really important question isn’t “How did he “earn” all all the money?”

The really important question is “When did he earn it?”

And it should be obvious even to a hockey-puck that Bill Clinton earned all that money in the White House, and his fantastic income is nothing but a huge deferred bribe.

So if you want to impress Barack Obama…

If you want Barack Obama to take an interest in the public good instead of always and only what’s good for Barack Obama…

Forget about Krugman’s arguments and any other variety of “public policy debate,” because all of it would pass right through Obama’s empty head like static on a radio, and instead of debating, slam Bill Clinton into prison for public corruption.

Send Obama this message!

“If you ever collect a dime from your corporate buddies, you’re going to prison, sucker!”

“You’re working for us now, you’re working for the public from now on, or you’re working for nobody!”

From the Street…

The richest Americans are getting richer, according to the latest release of the Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Americans. At a combined wealth of $1.37 trillion, the 400 richest Americans saw their wealth increase by 8% over last year.

Hurrah!

But on the downside, the market for movie stars is collapsing!

Today the actors who used to make $15 million are making $10 million. The filmmakers who used to make $10 million are making $6 million.

And why have salaries for all varieties of Hollywood “talent” declined? Some people blame a 25% decline in DVD sales, and many Hollywood insiders look all the way back to the writers’ strike in 1988 as an epiphany for studio moguls, who suddenly realized that money could be made without any talent whatsoever, and the first “reality shows” were born.

Whatever the root-cause or causes may be, the no-talent paradigm of Survivor Vanuatu now extends all the way to major releases!

The end result is a huge recalibration of the money being paid out to talent, especially in an era where a surprisingly large percentage of the biggest hit films, from “Up” to “The Hangover” to “Star Trek” and “Transformers,” are star-free movies, potential franchises that involve interchangeable parts.

But when even movie stars have been degraded into “interchangeable parts”…

What kind of individuality remains for you and me?

Now that Christine O’Donnell has described her “picnic on a satanic altar,” it’s time to revisit a Tom Tomorrow cartoon from 2005, and maybe now we can answer Bush’s question about the Republican base…

“What do I have to do to alienate these morons? Go on television and bite the head off a live bunny? And then declare my undying allegiance to Satan?”

But way back in 2005, most people thought it was just a joke!

Although pointy-headed liberals, progressives, and actual leftists constantly complain about our supposedly cold-hearted corporate masters, one of Apple Computer’s benevolent suppliers has set a new standard for worker safety by installing suicide nets around its factories, and even around the apartment blocks where many of its workers dwell, after a wave of worker-suicides last year.

So far in the last four and a half months seven workers from the plant have committed suicide, and at least 9 have attempted suicide.  According to reporter Liu Zhi Yi who infiltrated the plant, the likely reason why was that they felt taking their own life was the only option to escape the hellish working conditions of the plant.

According to Liu, the plant makes employees work around the clock, only pausing briefly to eat or sleep.  Most of the time the employees are standing, seldom able to sit down and rest their weary legs.  This is perfectly legal, as employees are required to sign a special overtime document that override Chinese workplace laws and essentially allows the employer to demand whatever hours they want from you, without additional compensation.

Foxconn pays the workers far too little for them to hope to buy one of the Apple products they assemble.  It pays them only 900 Chinese Yuan a month -about $130 USD.

But in spite of Foxconn’s anti-suicide apparatus, a few workers still manage to escape into oblivion.

A 22-year old female worker at Foxconn’s Kunshan factory committed suicide early yesterday morning. She only joined Foxconn at the end of March, where she worked packaging plastics.

Miss Liu was apparently saved by the safety nets rigged up several months ago in reaction to the spate of suicide-jumpers at Foxconn’s other factory in Shenzhen, however she later died from her injuries.

Welcome to your future! And don’t try to die on the job!

Haiti, September 22, 2010…

With 1.3 million displaced people in 1,300 camps, homelessness is the new normal here.

Some of the residents of those 1300 tent-cities have been writing letters to humanitarian organizations through letter-boxes set up by the International Organization for Migration.

I don’t have work, my tarp is torn, the rain panics me, my house was crushed, I don’t have money to feed my family, I would really love it if you would help me,” wrote Marie Jean Jean.

“M te konn renmen lapli,“ says a child in a tent. “I used to love the rain.” But now…

Rain means that the floor on which he sleeps turns to mud. Rain now means sometimes standing up all night long in fear of floods.

Pakistan, September 22, 2010

The outside world cannot foot the entire bill for Pakistan’s recovery from devastating floods and the Pakistani government must do more, US special envoy Richard Holbrooke said on Monday.

The day after world donors raised aid pledges to almost two billion dollars, Holbrooke said the eventual cost of the monsoon disaster could run into the “tens of billions of dollars.”

The same article mentions that now 12 million people in Pakistan need “emergency food aid.”

About 105,000 kids younger than 5 are at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition over the next six months, UNICEF estimates.

“You’re seeing children who were probably very close to the brink of being malnourished, and the emergency has just pushed them over the edge,” says Erin Boyd, a UNICEF emergency nutritionist working in southern Pakistan. “There’s just not the capacity to treat this level of severe acute malnutrition.”

So many children were already on the brink of severe malnutrition before the floods, and I guess their parents always hoped for a better tomorrow, but now what can they really hope for?

A jobless father of five who lost his house in Pakistan’s floods killed himself by setting himself on fire in front of the prime minister’s house, relatives and officials said.

Mohammad Akram, 30, doused himself before scores of people in front of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s family residence in the eastern city of Multan Sunday. Mohammad Asif, Akram’s brother, said he had been looking for a job for several months.

“We had a mud-brick house which was washed away by the floods and now we are homeless.”

Two explorers are captured by cannibals. “Death or bongo?” says the chief. “What’s bongo?” ask the explorers, but the chief only replies “Death or bongo?” The first explorer chooses bongo, and (without going into the gory details) it’s so horrible that the second explorer chooses death.

“Okay,” says the chief, “Death! But first… bongo!”

I remembered this old joke when the Census Bureau reported that now more Americans than ever before have no healthcare insurance.

Official estimates by the Census Bureau showing a dramatic spike of 4.3 million in the number of Americans without health insurance in 2009 – to a record 50.7 million.

And…

The jump of 4.3 million uninsured is the largest one-year increase on record and would have been much higher – over 10 million – had there not been a huge expansion of public coverage, primarily Medicaid, to an additional 5.8 million people.

And that is the real bipartisan plan for single-payer healthcare, as more of more of us lose our jobs and houses and sink below the income threshold for Medicaid, and eventually only a thin upper crust remains dependent on private health insurance, which they can easily afford, because they own everything!

“But at least we have Medicaid!” say the millions of formerly middle-class Americans. “Okay,” say the chiefs, “And now we cut Medicaid!”

Bongo!

On September 11, 2001, Islamist suicide-commandos crashed an airliner into the green fields of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because they hate our soil!

But two more airliners aimed at the soil of Central Park accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan…

And yet another incompetent terror-pilot, aiming at the Potomac (because they hate our water!) crashed into the Pentagon instead.

So al Qaeda’s real intentions were obscured by a flood of sensational images from the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and 9/11 was almost universally misinterpreted as an attack against militarism and globalization.