His high premiumness Viscount Verrilli stands, but does not deliver

On the final day of Supreme Court oral arguments regarding Obamacare, Chief Justice Roberts interrupted Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, the poor man drafted to defend the indefensible, to note, “You have another 15 minutes.” At which point Verrilli glumly remarked, “Lucky me.”

Ah, cheer up. No one ever made him out to be some tall and suave model gentleman-and-scholar, some fountain of manliness with a charmingly paradoxical soft side, some Lucretius J.D., some glowing trumpet of reason who cuts community ratings in half simply by passing through a country-side village in an electric car, some epitomic conjunction of man and art.

Well, not entirely anyway. NPR did tweet last Friday that Verrilli was a “gentleman and a scholar,” and went on to profile basic traits relevant to his role in articulating the constitutionality of the federal government’s unprecedented attempt to force Americans to buy stuff, such as how he “stands tall and calm in the Supreme Court chamber, his salt and pepper mustache the only thing about him that bristles.” And how “his deep, baritone voice suggests to the justices that he is the essence of reasonableness.” And how he is “a genuinely beloved figure, the kind of professional younger lawyers seek to emulate.” The profile ended with one final pragmatic, bare essentials question still on the minds of all civic-minded NPR listeners: “What makes him cry?”

Nevertheless, if there was any hope-and-changiness to go around in the case's run-up, perhaps it was less about the under-sold Verrilli and more about the general excitement of at last validating the brave new Mrs. Fix-it paradigm of the 21^st century. The atmosphere on the opening day was “electric,” said Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's Obamacare-advocating legal analyst.

But if optimism is a disease, consider the left-wing media cured. And consider Verrilli quarantined. Whereas NPR boasted on Friday of Verrilli that “only the occasional, needless throat-clearing betrays any nerves at all,” Mother Jones columnist Adam Serwer had concluded by Wednesday that Verrilli’s throat-clearing had jeopardized the entire Obamacare project: “He coughed, he cleared his throat, he took a drink of water. And that was before he even finished the first part of his argument.” Or in other words: Verrilli, you're such a pre-existing condition.

By the time the decision is released in June, NPR will likely have revised the history of Verrilli’s “flameout” (as Serwer called it) to match the narrative of an earnest man with none of the qualities of a lawyer cut down by the bigotry and ignorance of the Supreme Court. But for now, the oral arguments provide an unedited and fascinating glimpse into the mind of the Supreme Court on perhaps the most important question facing the United States today: what are the constitutional limits on federal power? 
                                                                                                                                                                              Most revealing were the questions and monologues (as caricatured in the accompanying pics) of the liberal Justices. From Justice Kagan’s “It’s just a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people’s healthcare,” to Justice Sotomayor’s jab at the excess of the “one percent,” to Justice Ginsburg’s frank “this penalty is designed to affect conduct,” to Justice Breyer’s answer to his own question of whether the government can require the purchase of cell phones: “Wouldn’t the answer be, yes, of course, they could.” But Verrilli himself revealed the most when he triumphantly declared that Obamacare is so expensive that of course the mandate is OK…indeed, actuarially necessary.  Read the transcripts and weep. And weep too for Verrilli, who, by virtue of his optimism disease, will raise your community rating by approximately 4.2% if he ever escapes his quarantine.

Islam's Sensitive Side

A future Pesh Merga commander in Iraqi Kurdistan
(Photo by Founders' Porch.)

Founders' Porch reports  from the Former Axis of Evil

Army sergeant majors like to joke about expensive military-issued “sensitive items” being worth more than soldiers themselves.  But that humor might not translate in Afghanistan, judging by the collective reaction to 1) the US Army’s accidental burning of the nation’s top “sensitive item,” and 2) the stalking and murder of sleeping families by a US Army soldier in Kandahar.  The former event had the Afghan people in near revolutionary furor, leaving 40 dead (including American soldiers killed by trusted Afghan trainees). The latter provoked the relatively mild protests that years of unintentional civilian killings have made grimly familiar. “How can you compare the dishonoring of the Holy Quran with the martyrdom of innocent civilians?” asked one prominent mullah. “The whole goal of our life is religion.” Or As NPR’s headline understated it: “For Afghans, Two Outrages, Two Different Reactions.”

And for Americans? To deploy Defense Secretary Leon Panetta himself this week was perhaps the only way to distinguish this apology from our Quran-burning reaction.  And before that there was the empathetic reaction of NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative Mark Sedwill to the García-Marquezesque community organized beheading of infidel civilians in their Mazar UN domicile last spring: “This was an act of disrespect to the Muslim faith.” No, not the inquisition-style executions, but rather the provocative burning of a $19.99 “sensitive item” in Florida. Many sensitive item outrages, one sensitive reaction.

But not all recent outrages involve the burning of a book which lists burning as one of the milder punishments awaiting non-Muslim NATO reps.  Invisible Children’s KONY2012 YouTube video urging continued US military help in capturing Joseph Kony hooked millions of outraged viewers last week.  And what seems to help make it so popular is precisely Kony’s lack of a sensitive item: “he is not fighting for any cause, but only to maintain his power,” narrates director Jason Russell.  One might quibble over where this viral morality was when, for instance, Kanan Makiya published his 1989 book “Republic of Fear,” documenting in Iraq what the late Max Van der Stoel called the greatest violation of human rights since World War II. But for causeless Kony, who unlike Saddam does not have a Quran written in his blood, perhaps the trouble can be summed up by the remix refrain of another viral Youtube video: “Dude, you have no Quran.”

                                                                                                                                 

Or as KONY2012 “culturemaker” Ben Affleck tweeted, it’s “not a political issue. It’s a human issue.” That’s in contrast to Iraq where, as Affleck once argued, the WMD lies and Afghanistan priorities should have absolved the US of the “human” cost of decades of American realpolitique (e.g., the Kurdish genocide).  “You owe us an apology,” a Kurdish student shouted at the lecture of the US Consul General to Kurdistan last fall, citing the 1975 and 1991 “betrayals,” and the coming December 2011 pullout.  Unfortunately for him, all our apology resources have been diverted to our betrayals of more sensitive items in Florida and Bagram.

Even so, when you walk through liberated, peaceful, Americans-dine-gratis Iraqi Kurdistan as I did last month, it is clear that for now, the Kanan Makiyas prevailed over the Ben Afflecks on the “human issue.” But walking past the months-old smutty remains of the Zakho Christians’ abandoned liquor stores (the aftermath of a mullah’s December jihad homily) was a stark reminder that here, as in the Baghdad slums hours away where gays are increasingly executed by order of pseudo-governmental Islamic fatwa, the West’s fear of the residual “political issue” of Islamic law remains our tragic flaw. Indeed, with a Christian teacher killed by a Muslim student in Sulaimaniyah this month, the Christians who were defiantly signing me the cross from the shadows should know that now, dudes, you have no Kanan.  

But they do have Orhan – Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, that is, whose 2004 novel Snow bravely faced down the “sensitivities and imagined insults” that poison Kurdistan’s Islamist politics, depicting persecutions of Turks who point out the most sensitive item’s inconsistencies (as well as the fascist retaliations). “I’ve always wanted this country to prosper, to modernize,” says the protagonist. “But it seemed to me that our religion was always against all this.”

When you can’t change the country, better to change the subject: that’s The New York Times take anyway. This week it ran an ad calling on Catholics to “quit” the Church while rejecting a parallel ad for Muslims, predicting possible “fallout” in Afghanistan. Of course, the prediction is well-found. Just last January novelist Salman Rushdie had to cancel an Indian literary festival trip due to Deobandi sensitivity to much less direct words written decades ago.  Having myself felt the dusty air sucked from a Kandahar City soccer pitch when I replied in the negative to a wild-eyed “you Muslim?” I can guess what Rushdie is getting at when he describes in an early novel just how the fallout falls on the non-Muslims: “the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant…he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles…” You know how it tends to end.

Army Regulation 600-20 states clearly that religion is “characterized by ardor and faith.” As for which religions have more ardor, leave it to a Pakistani military delegation to explain to US army privates: I recall a Culture Q&A at Basic Training culminating in a Pakistani Major providing us an actuarial summary of how the Prophet Muhammad’s miracles outnumbered those of Jesus.  Advantage Islam, in other words. Or as a University of North Carolina religious studies professor recently advised anyone confused about Afghans’ nuanced reactions to the Quran-burning fiasco, “If you really want to think of what the Quran means to Muslims, don't think of the Bible. Think of the very person of Christ.”

To be sure, when the shock and dizzying conspiracies wear off in Kandahar, the Panjway massacre will elicit plenty more outrage. But if the UNC prof’s primer left you wanting to know anything else about Islam, don’t expect to find it in the Times, literary festivals, or on any viral “human issues” video.  The next outrage – whether in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Africa, or elsewhere – and the West’s ensuing reaction should suffice.

Where have all the Chicago Boys gone?

E-e-e-everybody must get stoned.
(Founders' Porch)

How the Neo-libs can save Afghanistan. (Published at the Daily Caller)

As much as Congressman Ron Paul may enjoy ascribing the “neo-con” badge of shame to his hawkish opponents, he risked earning himself a demagogic “neo-lib” tag with his reply to a November presidential debate question on foreign aid: “we should export maybe some principles about free markets and sound money, and maybe they could produce some of their own wealth.” This is refreshing advice, yet unfortunately when it comes to applying it where it would save the most American lives – i.e. Afghanistan – many Ron Paulites and classical liberals seem more concerned with distancing themselves from “neo-con” nation-building than following Milton Friedman’s lead of pro-actively teaching the world to fish.  Indeed, while ending the war on drugs was a top priority for Friedman in his final years, the political calculations of his acolytes remain a key hindrance to rethinking the prohibition of Afghanistan’s most lucrative resource.

While poppy is conspicuously missing from the strategic debate, in Afghanistan’s plains it’s unavoidable. Last spring I drove to the outskirts of Tarin Kot, Uruzgan to purchase three cows for Mahmad, a beneficiary of a US-funded aid program.  With the Governor’s mansion only a few miles away, an ocean of humid poppy fields enveloped us – masses of the opiate, as it were. Here and there Afghan soldiers posed leisurely for Facebook photos as police jeeps snaked past. Officially, the stuff glistening for miles was illegal. Unofficially, it was quite popular – and as legal as a flat-rate bribe. Mahmad, who was eligible for aid because his son was killed when collecting candy from ISAF soldiers by a Taliban suicide-bomber, told me he would sell the cows’ milk to repay his farming debts. “What crops do you grow?” I asked. “Wheat,” he replied. Everyone listening laughed at the perfunctory lie (one readily celebrated by Alternative Livelihood Program technocrats). 

As US strategists grow increasingly desperate to wind Afghanistan down to a tolerable stalemate without putting more American lives at risk, turning to delusional fix-alls such as negotiating an end-game with the Taliban, there is a growing consensus that no option (save military escalation) is off the table.  Yet the refusal of supply-siders to dirty themselves in War-in-Afghanistan policy means that poppy legalization and its corresponding blow to Taliban drug monopolies and government kickback schemes remains not only ruled out, but politically taboo.

Conventional wisdom has it that a US-Afghanistan version of the existing US-Turkey and US-India poppy-for-medicine agreements is a nonstarter, given Afghanistan’s weak rule of law. This claim no longer levels with a strategy inching toward peace negotiations with Mullah Omar and a mid-2013 end to the US combat mission. If the rule of law can accommodate these high-risk courses of action, surely it can also accommodate one that relinquishes corrupt state power to the free market. Secondary arguments about using our poppy policy to keep Turkey and India – as well as Russia and Iran – happy suggest a relapse to Kissingerist morals. They also put faith in the idea that Russia, whose UN ambassador cryptically threatened this week to “hurt” US interests in Afghanistan due to the US position on Syria, responds amicably to tribute.

Most problematic is that the current policy, an evolution from prohibition to eradication (i.e. torching the livelihoods of rural peasants) to high-level interdiction of Afghanistan’s Al Capones, has failed. Not only have ten years and billions of dollars of US-funded counter-narcotics initiatives brought us poppy cultivation levels nearly twice as high as those during non-prohibition Taliban years (in 2011 alone, despite 521 ANSF-ISAF interdiction missions, opium production increased by 61%, and prices by 133%), but it has also created a dark underworld of drug lords and their extorted debtors.

Mahmad tragically lost a child, and was thus eligible for aid to pay off his poppy debt. But many poppy farmers, as PBS’s “Opium Brides” documentary startlingly revealed last month, choose to give their children to the Taliban in order to pay their poppy debts. ISAF’s newspaper boasted last week that 2011’s interdiction operations “hobbled the ability of the enemies of peace to harm Afghans and prevent them from living peaceful, prosperous lives.” But in reality, they’ve only heightened the debt collectors’ urgency. As Michael Hastings puts it in the recently released The Operators, “U.S. forces are not fighting and dying to combat terrorists, but are fighting and dying in local political disputes.”

With Afghanistan on the brink of an aid bubble burst and even Taliban purists calling counter-narcotics initiatives the “obliteration of the economy,” the folly of Carrie Nation nation-building is increasingly clear. Security strategist Anthony Cordesman warned last week that as Afghanistan braces for “massive capital flight,” its security force development is “in a state of total confusion,” with major elements that “cannot possibly be ready to stand on their own by the end of 2014.” Indeed, having been personally stopped at gunpoint by high policemen in Kandahar City, I’d venture that lack of training is not their only impediment to standing straight.

With such a clear case for rolling back poppy prohibition, where are the Chicago Boys when you need them? The Economist, which has fawned over “heavy weight champ” Friedman, and even taunted European leaders last month on the 100^th anniversary of the International Opium Convention for lacking “the cojones” to legalize narcotics, lamented in December that only “glacial progress” has been made in interdicting Afghan opium. Meanwhile, Reason’s Brian Doherty concluded last week that the lesson of Afghanistan is not to do “nation-building affairs more intelligently” (which might require signing Reason’s name to a neo-con blunder), but rather “to not get involved in them at all.” Cato, for its part, managed in its latest Afghanistan study to argue for a drastic 80-90% troop cut without once mentioning opium.

If the neo-libs could speak, a convincing tale they would tell on how legalization would bring the health benefits of transparency, would build up the capital for Afghans to restore their destroyed fruit orchards, and would hardly offer new opportunities for abuse in a country whose pharmacies require no prescriptions. They might cite the growing consensus reflected in the Drug Commission Report of June 2011 or Christopher Snowdon’s prescient new book “The Art of Suppression.” They might counter the ISAF jurisprudence of opium as “haram” by quoting farmers well inside Taliban territory who say “we will die for it.” But until they gain the “cojones,” their tragic nation-building prophecy will be self-fulfilling.

Peace talks are delusional

Why we shouldn't confirm Mullah Omar's friend request...

(Published at the Daily Caller)

When a Youtube video surfaced last week featuring Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta responded quickly and clearly: “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” The directness contrasted with the more indefinite conclusion of an 8-month Air Force investigation into the motive of an Afghan pilot who killed eight of his U.S. Air Force mentors in a suicidal shooting spree at Kabul International Airport (KIA) last April.  The report found that shooter Ahmad Gul – who spent 18 months at a fundamentalist mosque in Pakistan before recently returning to Afghanistan because he “wanted to kill Americans” – prayed all night before the attack at his pro-Pakistan Kabul mosque and shouted in between shots for “good Muslims [to] please stay away.” Yet even with the writing seemingly on the wall –indeed, he wrote “Allah is one” on a wall with his blood and died of his self-inflicted wounds chanting “Allah, Allah” – the report found no conclusive motive. It did, however, partially rule out one: “none of the co-workers believed SUBJECT was a religious radical.”

The growing buzz of peace talks with the Taliban suggests that ten years into the war in Afghanistan, many US strategists view the Taliban leadership’s motives with a similar degree of inconclusive naiveté.  Earlier this month the New York Times, for example, endorsed peace talks, provided that the Taliban “accept the Afghan Constitution and its commitments to political and human rights for all Afghans.” Yet the Taliban, who have opened a political office in Qatar, see talks differently: a Taliban website claimed this week that it “rejects the poisonous propaganda of the enemy which depicts as if [sic] we will be content with having control of a few provinces.” Indeed, a recent “top-secret” US intelligence memo claiming that the Taliban  are still set on reclaiming power and imposing Sharia on Afghanistan was no news to any Afghan that recalls Mullah Omar’s megalomaniacal self-proclamation of universal “commander of the faithful.”

While the US push for negotiations reflects a larger strategic reevaluation along the lines of a December report by the influential Center for a New American Strategy, which called for a “shift away from directly conducting counterinsurgency operations and toward a new mission of ‘security force assistance,’” the Taliban’s strategy remains unchanged. Ironically, it is precisely the US’ blindness to the Taliban’s ideological conclusiveness that has made US strategy so inconclusive. Every month seems to bring a new busybody solution to the Afghanistan nation-building dilemma – the latest being the “New Silk Road,” which will cure Afghanistan with economic stimulus.  And for every delivery of staple food items that gets burned by the Taliban, the relief technocrats see new evidence of the need to provide more robust incentives to a disenfranchised insurgency. As long as the insurgency’s phantasmal root causes escape us, so too will appropriate responses.

Of course, admitting that Deobandi fundamentalism in Pakistan is the key energizer of the insurgency in Afghanistan hardly seems to simplify matters. As US Envoy Marc Grossman learned this week when Pakistani officials refused to meet with him, talking to Pakistan can be harder than talking to the Taliban.  If Americans are weary of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, they certainly won’t go for it in a country where Salman Taseer’s assassin (whose grievance was Taseer’s opposition to the death penalty for blasphemers) was garlanded last year by fawning crowds; where policemen salute the revered Taliban in their Boluchi mini-state; and where the most popular leader is the ascendant playboy Imran Khan, who recently called liberals “the scum of Pakistan.”

The scum, for their part, are morbidly candid about their odds in the land of Islamist godfather Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, or Zia ul “yuckee,” as the pop band Beygairat Brigade puts it in a music video that ends with a request to “like” it “if you want a bullet through my head.” Fortunately for Veena Malik, the popular Pakistani actress who recently posed topless to show-off a spoof ISI tatoo, the “dislikes” outnumber the “likes” on most of her web clips. Yet as she admits, “If some mullah on the TV today says shoot the girl, they will shoot me.”

The instability and, frankly, Islamo-fascism in nuclear Pakistan endanger Americans from Bombay to Times Square, and necessitate our success in Afghanistan.  Yet whereas the counterinsurgency advocates recognize that defeating the ideological power centers in Pakistan requires uncompromising support and security for Afghanistan’s counter-ideologies (e.g. secularism, liberal Islam), the nation-builders fail to see that the ideologies exist at all. The KIA rampage came just weeks after a mob of Afghans, including “reintegrated” Taliban, thrashed its way into a United Nations (UN) compound in Mazar-e Sharif and slit the throats of the international staff and Gurkha guards, letting the compound's lone Muslim go without a scratch. Yet the main conclusion of the UN’s Afghanistan chief, Staffan De Mistura, was “I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghans,” the cause being Terry Jones’ “despicable” Koran burning – the same adjective NATO used to describe the recent Marine incident. It was a similar attitude that months earlier had led the media to conclude that an Afghan policeman who killed six US soldiers had simply reached a personal “boiling point,” though it has since emerged that he hailed from a family of Talibs and enjoyed songs mocking those who skirt their jihad duties.

Negotiating with the Taliban can make sense on issues other than the end-game, such as the release of Sgt Bowe Bergdahl. But grander pretensions of “peace talks,” though they may produce consensus on a post-war vision of windmills, composting lessons, and institutional capacity, are a grim reminder for the aspiring Veena Maliks of the region of which kind of talk is safest. Indeed, if we do cede Afghanistan to the Taliban, “none believed subject was a religious radical” will be a fitting epitaph for the international coalition.

Who pays more in taxes?

See for your self. I'd say the tax incidence outlined below would be perfectly just if votes were counted on a weighted-tax basis. So the famous one-percenters' votes counted towards 29.5% of the total and the bottom 20% only accounted for 4.7%. Then I'd be jealous of all those rich people... paying every one else's bills for them.

Crony Capitalism

We. Shall. Overspend.

OWS and Hezbollah have less in common than you think

Say what you will about the Occupy Wallstreet protesters, but when you do, be sure to project rhythmically and stop every few syllables to allow for a minionish echo, as is their customary way of interacting with the 75% of Americans who do not support the 99%. “We. (We). Are. (Are). The 99% (The 99%).” You might rebut with a chant about how the 20% of US households are making the 75% of their money from the federal government. But here at Occupy McPherson Square in DC – home to the nation’s highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year – the 99 percenters (38% of whom are 25-34) would counter with some give-us-government-money-when?-now!-why?-because! chant, destroying $400,000 worth of stimulus landscaping in the process and  reminding you why 100% of the 99% generation’s children will be born into debt, the precise amount of which cannot be quantified in an echo chant due to its having increased by $400,000 in the time it takes to repeat it.

Of course, everyone likes a good revolution.  Perhaps that’s why a stroll through Occupy McPherson leaves one feeling so defrauded, wondering why all the proverbial ragamuffins-of-the-nation have set their sights on so slight a target this time.  “Yeah ok,” a percentage of the 99 percenters will concede, “there are some things more corrupt and reprehensible than the bagger 1% -- such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms deciding that a great way to improve a gun-tracing scheme that gives guns to Mexican druglords is to scrap the ‘tracing’ requirement.”  Then again, perhaps OWS pundit Mark Ames (the Matt “wallstreet-is-a-vampire-squid-on-the-face-of-humanity” Taibbi bash-brother) put it all in its proper context with his recent article entitled, “Historical graph shows perfect correlation between austerity programs and mass violence.”

Indeed, supposing the reason the ATF agents were making their own gun-tracing beacons from personal Radio Shack purchases was because the ATF was too austerely penny-pinched to fork it over itself, Ames has a point regarding the mass violence in Mexico. But the tears of the Italian Welfare Minister earlier this month suggest that Mexicans can find solidarity with an Italian people confronting the horrors of raising the female minimum pension age to 66…by 2018. “We had to… and it cost us a lot psychologically… ask for a…” We are all 66 year-old pensioning doñas now.

One Occupy Portland woman was so pyshologically accosted, for example, that she resorted to placing her 4 year-old daughter on train tracks. “I don’t think that any person driving a train is going to plow through a bunch of peaceful people with children,” she assured the 1%. Yet a contrarian might note that she failed to consider the contingency of it being an Amtrak train, in which case a mother might reevaluate betting her child’s life on the conductor’s mile-out stopping competence, even if that mother already sold the child’s life out in favor of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded Amtrak pensions.

But more than a protest against the cold borscht of austerity, mock-heroic evidence suggests the Occupiers might be fighting against occupation itself: Israeli occupation, that is. Ames’ friend Max Blumenthal wrote earlier this month in a pro-Hezbollah paper of the “Israelification of America’s security apparatus,” claiming that the pepper-spraying police of UC Berkley had been trained in their dark arts by an Israeli-Bahraini assassination squad. When Atlantic columnist Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out that Blumenthal misquoted his key source, Blumenthal noted that the retort by “Ex-detension camp guard Cpl. Goldberg” (he served in the IDF) was something reminiscient of “Putin’s Russia.”

As the take-your-kid to OWS echo chant went last week: “Not every police officer. Is bad. Just like. In school. Not every student. Is bad. But. One person. Can ruin it.” Or, just one extrajudicial international police strike force.  In footage reminiscient of  a “Nasha Youth meets brain-washed Hezbollah toddlers in camoflage pull-ups” rally, the teaching moment escalated into the placing of the kids’ finger-painted hearts on police property. The Israelified police responded with the covert Yehudakhat rip-down technique, resulting in lots of kids crying like an Italian Welfare Minister.

 It would be interesting to know how the Hezbollahs – who, as Lebanese journalists can attest, know a little about extra-judicial hits – interpreted the contrived desperation of Blumenthal’s article. Perhaps in the way one reads a Wikipedia please-look-at-me “personal appeal.” For even Hezbollah, basking in the glory of announcing the capture of nine CIA agents this month, felt fit to advertise as one of its top ensuing findings a tea-partyish indightment of the excesses of an overstretched federal bureaucracy. In a brooding animation video set to shrill music, a narrator reveals: “The CIA’s financial system with agents is corrupt…The officer requests the agents’ signature on a receipt that confirms the agent received the money. However what that agent receives is less than the number inked on the receipt.”

Silly Hezbollahs. This is post-America America: we signed up for signing for more than we receive (unless of course you were lucky enough to get in on, say, the $98 billion in erroneous Medicare payments in 2009). OWS sees a higher calling: “What do we want? No, really, like, what do we want, because this is getting lame and my tent is like, caked in waxy mold.” 

Unfortunately, nothing about government largesse fits the name "1 percent." Until OWS gets that, This. Is. What. Fatuousness. Looks. Like.