Mammon category archive

Warning: Language.

Real estate developers.

Walmart.

Daniel Ruth:

. . . by now, after years of stores hyping their big sales and discounts on various items to entice you across their thresholds, you are aware those same discounts will in all probability be available right up until the doors close on Dec. 24?

. . . even though you don’t own it. My local rag describes the scam; here’s a snippet:

Michael Russo, an attorney who handles title insurance cases in Annapolis, Md., calls them “orphaned properties.” In one case, he said, the family of a woman who died discovered she had purportedly sold her property to someone three weeks earlier. By the time they found out, that person had flipped the property to a legitimate buyer. The family had to prove, without her there, that she never made the sale.

(snip)

Pam Day, owner of Day Title Services in Richmond, said technology is making such crimes even easier. Land records are now on the Internet, enabling thieves to electronically lift and replicate signatures. It could get worse if the industry starts using one electronic signature for closing, which she said some people advocate because buyers and sellers wouldn’t need to sign huge stacks of paper.

“That’s where we are going in the future,” she said, “but unfortunately, you’ve got the World Wide Web of crooks out there.”

Via Juanita Jean.

Jon Stewart discusses the Republican Party’s efforts to benefit Canadian oil, because Big Money is, after all, Big Money.

Video below the fold in case it autoplays.

Read more »

Funny or Die wonders what life would be like if utilities acted like American ISPs.

Yves Smith, blogging at Naked Capitalism, dissects the privatization scam. A nugget:

As the post below on the march of school privatization in Wisconsin demonstrates, those concerns are remarkably absent from current debates. The training of children is simply another looting opportunity, like privatizing parking meters and roads. The objective is yet another transfer from some of the remaining members of the middle class, public school teachers, to the promoters. And this process also produces an important side benefit for socially unenlightened capitalists: that of slowly breaking one of the last influential unions.

And lest you had any doubt, despite the claim that charter schools help children, the evidence is that it doesn’t. Moreover, the pattern in capitalism American style is towards ever-greater crapification. So imagine what private schools, where the operators are on relatively good behavior because the project is still in its demonstration phase, look like in ten years.

Do read the rest.

There ain’t no such thing, at least, not through honesty. Will Bunch:

Our modern AC was born, essentially of a panic that set in during the mid-1970s, when it first became clear that factory jobs might not be coming back. It’s kind of ironic that gambling in Atlantic City was born of a gambler’s mentality — the idea that a faded city could win it all back with one role of the dice, a kind of magical thinking that this would work…because no one else east of Las Vegas would ever open a rival casino.

(snip)

That’s why it’s kind of nauseating to see Philadelphia take one more compulsive step down this pathway of failure. Casinos are “economic development” in the same sense that Taco Bell is “dinner.”

Werner Herzog’s Bear wonders why those so quick to gin up a nonexistent “war on Christmas” haven’t noticed the real war on Thanksgiving. A snippet:

But the war on Thanksgiving is plain to see, and that war is being waged by Black Friday, capitalism’s Walpurgisnacht. That orgy of consumerist frenzy has now invaded Thanksgiving, with several retailers opening their door and turning a day for family and reflection into a disgusting exercise of our country’s least attractive values. It is a war in that Black Friday is not only taking hours from Thanksgiving, it is undermining its very value system. Our capitalist Moloch does not profit from family time, does not profit from a quiet day of contemplation, does not profit from the cherished stillness of that blessed day. (As a child it seemed that there was no other day of the year so peaceful as Thanksgiving.) It profits from people trampling each other to buy Xboxes.

RIP, Valley of Virginia.

The federal government will allow a controversial form of gas extraction called fracking in the George Washington National Forest, but it will sharply cut the amount of land on which fracking could occur.

The much-anticipated decision represents in effect a compromise between people who feared fracking would harm the 1.1 million acre forest and industry representatives who said the process can be done safely.

John Romano notes that the new buzz word in the effort to destroy public education seems to be “customization,” something that apparently applies only to private schools. A nugget:

It is part of a philosophy that says parents should be calling the shots when it comes to the education of their children. That means more charters and more voucher money. It means home-schooling and virtual schools. Essentially, it means parents know best.

So here’s my question:

What about customization in traditional public schools?

If parents have concerns about Common Core-inspired standards, shouldn’t they be able to request an alternative curriculum? If parents feel their children are not ready for cookie-cutter standardized tests, shouldn’t they be able to opt out? The short answer:

No.

This has nothing to do with children and everything to do with “privatizing” the public’s money.

An interview with the fellow who actually read a “Privacy Policy.”

. . . in words of one syllable, because it’s for Ted Cruz.

Via Mediaite.

The Medicine Show.

The privatization scam at work:

Even in a school district with more than its share of charter-school controversies, the answers stood out. Questioned about billing practices, two officials of an embattled Philadelphia charter school cited their Fifth Amendment right to silence – 77 times.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

As much as I respect Constitutional rights, I mean, really, over billing practices?

I’m sure this will work out well, except, natch, for teachers and students and who the hell cares about them anyhow.