Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Marine Lance Cpl. Travis M. Nelson, 19, of Pace, FL.
2. Army Spc. Joshua M. Seals, 21, of Porter, OK.
3. Army Spc. Dennis G. Jensen, 21, of Vermillion, SD.
4. Army 1st Lt. Damon T. Leehan, 30, of Edmond, OK.
5. Army Spc. Joseph A. VanDreumel, 32, of Grand Rapids, MI.
6. Army Sgt. Matthew A. Harmon, 29, of Bagley, MN.
7. Army Master Sgt. Charles L. Price III, 40, of Milam, TX.
8. Army 2nd Lt. Joe L. Cunningham, 27, of Kingston, OK.
9. Army Pfc. Rueben J. Lopez, 27, of Williams, CA.
10. Army Spc. Jordan M. Morris, 23, of Stillwater, OK.
11. Army Spc. Patrick L. Lay II, 21, of Fletcher, NC.
12. Army Spc. Jameel T. Freeman, 26, of Baltimore, MD.
13. Army Sgt. Edward J. Frank II, 26, of Yonkers, NY.
14. Navy Hospitalman Riley Gallinger-Long, 19, of Cornelius, OR.

Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 66.

PressTV had a number of reports of drones getting shot down; here is one. Could be a coincidence, could be propaganda, could be a new weapon or tactic being used against them.

Architectures of violence: Famine and profits

Richard Murphy’s term “feral economy” might join “vampire squid” in the lexicon of early 21st century finance. It’s a pungent image that rings true and is already being widely quoted. Here is just one example.

Avedon Carol has long beaten the drum on cheap labor conservatives. Starting with a re-post of this article she has highlighted the issue again and again and again and again and again. Nouriel Roubini just observed that they are destroying not just the middle class but the entire capitalist system. (One quibble: It might be fair to start asking if capitalism, like communism, cannot fail but only be failed. Bringing down a Utopian system that makes no allowance for what actually motivates and animates people should be thought of more as the end of a mass delusion than the killing of the golden goose.)

Jan Schakowsky introduced a jobs bill to put two million people back to work.

No one sums up the current dynamic better than digby: “The problem is that Republicans define not getting their way 100% as a sell-out and Democrat define giving away 98% of their position as compromise. That tends to leave people on both sides with a bad taste in their mouths.”

ModernEsquire had been documenting John Kasich’s flailing this week. First, to review. He’s already said “I want to break the back of teachers unions.” Now he’s getting his ass handed to him, so catch up with this, this, this and this.

David Dayen reported from Los Angeles:

Rigoberto told of his life as an undocumented student with a citizen brother, who had his mother deported through S-Comm. “My brothers were taken by a social worker, sent to foster families, I couldn’t take custody of them,” he said. “This program is unjust and unfair, it keeps separating families.”

Bank of America really can’t die fast enough.

Karl Rove pushed marriage inequality issues in 2004 and it helped his boy get elected. But a couple years ago the country decided maybe gays weren’t as terrifying as previously feared, and all of a sudden the right finds itself fighting a losing battle - one that will drag their party down for years to come. Now Karl looks at what he hath wrought in the GOP presidential field and it dawns on him that, in part because of his active and energetic support, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. At what point do folks stop looking at him as a Machiavellian genius and start looking at him as the king of the Pyrrhic victory?

John Nichols on the recalls in Wisconsin.

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 166-7 (emph. in orig.):

The worst is that we now have looting version 2.0, far more pernicious and difficult to extirpate than the initial release. In the original Akerlof and Romer [pdf] construct, the behavior was clearly criminal and easy to identify in retrospect. But while it was in progress, the CEOs perpetrating control fraud created effective smoke screens by suborning controls and enlisting law and accounting firms, normally the protectors of the public interest. And recall from our discussion in Chapter 6 that in 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that lawyers and accountants could not be sued for aiding and abetting securities fraud, so the barriers to this activity are lower than before.

In the financial services industry version of looting, we instead have firms where operational authority is decentralized, vested in senior business managers, or “producers.” Because of industry evolution and perceived competitive pressures, these producers, as a result of formal incentives plus values held widely within the industry, focused solely on capturing the maximum amount possible in the current bonus period. The formal and informal rewards system thus tallies exactly with the topsy-turvy scheme of “maximizing current extractable value.”