The Evil Empire strikes back: Mayor De Blasio, New York charter schools, Eva Moskowitz, and the million dollar anti-De Blasio smear campaign

There's something behind the current
TV smear campaign against New York's
 Mayor Bill De Blasio – and concern for
    kids isn't it, despite what the hate ads say.

It was during the televised debates for the last New York mayoral campaign when Joe Lhota, the candidate of the moneyed interests, grumbled that Democratic candidate Bill de Blasio was guilty of “class warfare.”

Lhota did more than lose with that kind of thinking. The outraged city’s voters all but clubbed him to death, with de Blasio taking 73 percent of the vote. 

We New Yorkers had our say. De Blasio promised, and we wanted an end to outrageously ubiquitous stop-and-frisk policies. We wanted a pre-K program funded by a tax on the very wealthy that would cost the one percenters an average of $973, the equivalent of a small soy latte a day. And although New York’s voters in general had no objection to charter schools per se, we didn’t want these schools operating at the expense of the city’s public school system

Lattes, gelato, and revenge

De Blasio set to work fulfilling his campaign promises. And now, like the Evil Empire’s death star in space, the one percent is striking back. Hey, tax a guy the price of a latte he sips in his limo, and the next thing you know the government will be coming after him for the price of a gelato, too. No wonder the rich are furious.

The vengeful counterattack started with Eva Moskowitz, a one-time city council member, whose current $450,000 salary puts her squarely among the one percent

Moskowitz makes her $450,000 as the head of a charter school corporation that now is benefiting from an onslaught of attack adds that have their death rays aimed at the mayor. More than a million bucks of media spending is reportedly behind the ad campaign. All of that money is getting spent in New York television.

You can’t turn on the TV in the morning, or go to bed a night, without being exposed to the hate commercials launched by De Blasio’s enemies in the charter school establishment. The TV spots are not only relentless, they’re also designed to toy with New Yorkers’ emotions. Who could fail to feel heartbroken for the nicely dressed little kid, a minority kid at that, who looks into the camera and says, “Mayor De Blasio, don’t take away my school?”

There are only, a small handful of problems with this appeal. For openers, most of the public school kids are minority kids, too. And the mayor isn’t trying to close down charter schools. He’s trying to accommodate most of them – even though charter schools currently teach  only a total of 70,000 kids in a school system responsible for 1,100,000 of them. Moreover, the charter schools are using space in the public schools free of charge.  

In order to help a few kids

screw the helpless ones

You can bet the free space is a problem, says Mayor De Blasio. In order to accommodate these charter schools in public school spaces, the mayor says  [warning: lengthy video clip] he has been been forced, in various cases… 

• To deprive public school students of a science lab
• To take away the public school kids’ gym
• To hold lunch hour at 9 a.m. so that the lunch space could be used at noon by a charter school.

In particular contention is P.S. 811, a special needs school, serving severely disabled kids. Eva Moskowitz wants to steal space from those disabled kids for 194 students taught by Moskowitz’s corporation, which, let me remind you again, pays no rent to the city. And she has been pushing for this for quite some time.

A secret motivation? 

Follow the Koch money.

In all probability, Moscowitz’s corporation could take the millions they’re spending to attack De Blasio and use it to rent commercial space for their school. The fact that they don’t do so could make you wonder. Is this really an attempt to get a relative handful of kids educated at a charter school?

Or is it really the campaign for the next election gearing up more than three years too early – all in hope of slamming De Blasio for having the gall to demand the rich ante up the price of a soy latte for pre-schools? And wouldn’t you imagine the education-minded charter school folks would favor pre-schools?

Given that there was big Koch Brothers money backing the trounced Joe Lhota during the last mayoral election, you’d have every right to suspect that this whole charter school fuss has nothing to do with educating a few charter school kids, and has everything to do with getting even with Bill De Blasio for having the temerity to win the election and propose a tax hike that would cost millionaires some of their loose change.

How’s your big interruptive mouth? Maybe my fist could improve it -a nostalgic reprint

Somebody asked me the other night what my best post ever was. Hard to say, dude, but my favorite is my very first, posted June 7th, 2006. It's an event you never forget, like the birth of a first child or a first sexu...nevermind. Anyway, here it is again, inspired by a fit of nostalgia.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 07, 2006
You know who I want to bust in the teeth? The waiter who sticks his face between me and the people I’m dining with and interrupts the conversation and the mood to ask, “And how is everything, sir?”

Who’s the idiot who teaches these guys to do this?

The truth is, when the food turns out to be cold, or there’s a parboiled cockroach in the linguini, or you ordered steak and some assistant to the chief assistant bus boy brings a piece of liver to your table instead, lots of luck trying to find the waiter.

Ditto when you want the check and you’re in a rush to make an appointment or a theater curtain. That’s when Mr. And How Is Everything does his vanishing act.

But try to tell a joke and guaranteed, just when you get to the point where you’re about to deliver the perfectly timed punch line, you’ll be interrupted by, “And how is everything, sir?”

You idiot! Your moron! Everything sucks! You’ve just ruined my joke, not to mention my mood and my dinner.

No wonder you flunked out of acting school.

The trick of being a good waiter is to be there when you’re needed and to stay out of the way when you’re not. Nobody needs you to change the subject of the conversation. Got it?

Then get out of my face.

Barbarians at the political club gate! Wall Streeter makes a grab for a New York State Assembly seat the old fashioned way – with a brutally cold-blooded raid.

What's the difference between a barbarian,
a corporate raider, and a political raider?
Read on and you'll learn: not much.

Now comes the next question. Is the raider really a Democrat? Or is he a Republican or a Tea Party vandal in sheep’s clothing?

In the beginning, there were the barbarians. Not the Wall Street kind. I’m talking about the good old-fashioned kind, the ones with the swords, and the maces, and the spears, and the battering rams, and the flaming torches.

They found a target. They attacked. They burned. They raped. They killed. They pillaged. They took what they wanted and then moved on, leaving another hapless corner of civilization in ruins as they went.

Their destructive, merciless, and ultimately unredeeming method of filling theirs pockets – and passing along barbarian DNA by getting to rape women as a fringe benefit – was so unforgettable and so reviled for its anti-social brutality that it its perpetrators have lent their name to other forms of anti-social behavior ever since. These have ranged from a moniker for litterbugs in a 1960s public service advertising campaign, to the perpetrators of hostile corporate takeovers.

Wall Street barbarians:

equally barbaric for their time

You know the quintessential impression of a corporate takeover: the raider grabs a company by making its stockholders an offer they can’t refuse. Then the barbarian rapes the company, breaks it up into little pieces, ships jobs overseas, throws loyal workers with years of experience out into the street, sells off the corporate pieces like a barbarian selling off prisoners at a slave market, pockets his profits, and then moves on.

Now a Wall Street investment banker has brought almost the same technique, and certainly the same lack of conscience, to Manhattan politics.

The victim in this instance is a middle-of-the-road Democratic Party political organization called the Lenox Hill Democratic Club, in Manhattan’s chic “silk stocking district” on the Upper East Side. And the perpetrator of an entirely new variety of political travesty, according to press reports in two different newspapers, is a Wall Street investment banker named Gus Christensen.

The man who bought the votes

A story in the New York Daily News, reports that Christensen wrote a lots of small checks “to cover the dues of his pals who joined the Lenox Hill Democratic Club.”  Incidentally, it’s probably the cheapest political putsch in history. He bought control of the club for $2,600, says the Daily News. A similar report appeared in a chain of Manhattan neighborhood newspapers called The New York Press.

The new voting club “members” evidently had little or no interest in strengthening the future of the Democratic Party. In fact, says the Daily News, among them are “some who neither live on the East Side nor belong to the Democratic Party.”

By packing the membership rolls and outnumbering the legitimate and mostly long-term club members, Christensen, newly married for the second time, got himself elected to the presidency of the club.

This is important because in New York, the local political clubs supply the manpower to solicit signatures for nominating petitions of candidates for office. The Daily News reports “Christensen has aspirations to run for State Asssembly in the 76^th district, and presumably will use Lenox Hill as a springboard for his campaign.”

Christensen’s former firm

aids corporate raiders

Where does this political barbarian get his bright ideas? Well, a quick check of his former investment banking firm, Evercore Partners, reveals that Evercore is no stranger to the corporate raiding business. While it has worked both sides of the street, advising some raiders and some defenders against raids, in the last few years it’s worth nothing that it has “advised” on a number of high profile attacks.

Specifically, Evercore advised International Paper Company in its hostile takeover of Temple Inland, a large manufacturer of containerboard. It also advised NASDAQ on a hostile takeover bid for The New York Stock Exchange and Euronext.

One wonders, given his Wall Street associations and his roundup of paid non-Democrats to overwhelm the vote in a Democratic club, whether Christensen is even a Democrat himself.

A secret Tea Party operative?

 Christensen’s evidently total lack of regard for his fellow Democrats causes me to wonder. Could Christensen actually be another kind of character from the not-always-mythical past, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? A Trojan Horse? How do we know his private agenda isn’t that of an ultra-conservative Republican? Or a Tea Party stalwart? Of an abortion rights buster, or an NRA gun nut, or a Club For Growther? We can’t, because even if he ever denies it, who can trust the word of a smash-and-grab political raider?

However, Christensen evently doesn’t even trust himself to say where he stands. He’s simply not talking.

“Christensen declined repeated interview requests, and a spokesman would not directly address club members’ complaints that Christensen stacked the deck before the club’s vote,” the Daily News reported

Nuclear catastrophes for dummies: I’m talking to you, Lindsay Graham

Required reading for
Republicans and Tea
Party stalwarts

Let me start out with a small dose of whatever the opposite of nostalgia is.

I’m talking about when I was in the fifth grade, or maybe it was the fourth grade, back in Nineteen F….well, nevermind the year. What I have in mind is a day when my teacher, complying with instructions from the New York City Board of Education, which in turn was complying with orders from whatever department ran something called Civil Defense, taught us a life-saving drill.

The drill went like this. Out of the blue, the teacher would shout, “Take cover!” And we nine- and ten-year olds would dive under our wooden desks and cover our heads with our arms. It may have looked silly, but this was going to protect us from a nuclear blast and nuclear radiation. Don’t ask me how. I still haven’t figured it out.

Black and blue under

my old school desk

Drills like this continued through high school. I have to tell you that as we grew older, the desks – the old fashioned kind, standing on wrought iron legs that were screwed to the floor ­ – the desks seemed to grow smaller a. A number of times I banged myself up pretty badly, knocking a knee against the wooden seat, or banging an elbow or a forearm or my head against the wrought iron legs. I had angry black and blue bruises from practicing safety.

And the beauty part was, none of it was worth a tinker’s damn. You can’t protect yourself from nuclear radiation by hiding under a wooden desk and putting your arms over your head like a puppy who’s afraid he’s going to get swatted with a newspaper. What you can do in this position is, you can get very nasty radiation burns on your forearms and eyelids before you go blind and you die vomiting from radiation sickness.

Had war ever broken out, the United States and Russia  would have been as done as a porkchop broiled down to ashes and a charred bone on a barbecue grill. We had something called MAD, which stood not for Mother’s Against Drunks, or something having to do with Madison Avenue and advertising, but for Mutually Assured Destruction.

The ultimate MAD men

MAD was kind of a lunatic deal between the United States and the then Soviet Union: you can launch a hail of nukes at us and kill us all, but before we’re all dead, we’ll do the same to you. The beauty part of the deal was, it worked both in forward and reverse. Whether you were an American or a Russian, the warning was the same: don’t start up or somebody’s going to roast your hide even if you roast theirs.

Eventually, somebody realized that given the inevitability of Murphy’s Law, if we kept relying on MAD, something was going to go wrong, go wrong, go…well, you know. A piece of radar would read an aluminum foil pie plate tossed like a frisbee as an incoming nuke. Or some bored-to-insanity soldier in a silo would press a red button just to break up the day and see what happens. Instantly, somebody would launch a counter-strike. And them…kaboom!

So eventually, we learned to live without worrying much about the Russians, and they, without worrying much about us. It was just too MAD. We instead spent our time invading small Asian and middle-eastern nations instead, and later sending home only the dead bodies of our volunteers because, after Viet Nam, we finally eliminated the draft. 

Smart, brutal gangsters

The Russians, meanwhile starting acting like American gangsters with bigger-than-normal brains. They stole natural resources. They stole entire companies, and when the lawyer for one of those companies, a man named Sergei Magnitsky protested, they arrested him and beat him to death in prison.

Sitting on top of this festering heap of corruption and violence is what I can best describe as a crooked ex-cop, Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, or whatever they call it now. Putin has a rogue cop’s mentality. If you want it, grab it. If somebody protests, tune him up ‘till he dies. You want the Ukraine back? Send in the troops.

Putin is a very dangerous excuse for a human being, and what he wants now more than anything is to bring the Ukraine, historically a Soviet republic, back under the control of Moscow. So while his troops in the Ukraine might (or might not) be committing an act of sheer brazen theft, the last thing you want to do is walk up to him and tell him his mother is a diseased hooker, and furthermore he can go pound sand up his butt. 

This is a delicate situation. Mistakes happen. And mistakes breed automatic counter-mistakes, thanks to the MAD system left over from the cold war.

Enter Lindsay Graham,

high as a kite on stupid pills

Senator Lindsay Graham has seized on the current situation in the Ukraine like a fifteen year old juvenile delinquent, trying to find out if it’s really true what they say about gasoline and matches. He’s actually only trying to make President Obama look bad now that Obamacare is starting to work, taking a Let’s-you-and-Putin-Fight stance. But he’s holding a lighted match while standing over an open container of gasoline, and anything explosive can happen.

On CNN recently, Graham declared:

“Putin's on the wrong side of history. He's on the wrong side of the law. Make him pay a price. The Ukrainian people are dying for their freedom. I hope we will stand with them. Not just in words, but in deeds.”

Stand with them and 

do what, die with them?

Even if you’re not really talking about military action, Lindsay, one thing has a way, as they say, of leading to another. Some homicidal yutz assassinated the crown prince of Sarajevo, and the next thing you know, we had World War I. Somebody today blockades Russia and the next  thing you know…kaboom!

Well, the good news is that if people like Lindsay Graham have their way, we can fan the nearly-dead embers of the Cold War back into a nice crackling campfire. In order to arm for that, we’d have to reinstitute the draft. And once the lives of virtually every American son and daughter are at stake, you can bet the voters won’t be putting up with bullshit like Dick Chaney's Iraq invasion again.

However, a warning. One of these days, just by accident, a cold war across a now-rusty iron curtain could get red hot. And if that happens with Russia, happy Nukeday.

I’d like to leave you with with the heartwarming conversation between a young infantry private in training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and a grizzled old training sergeant, back in 1962. It was during a lesson  on something called CBR – Chemical, Biological and Radiological warfare. And here, I swear, is precisely how it went.

PRIVATE: Sergeant, what do you do if a nuke goes off say, within walking distance? 

SERGEANT: Son, let me teach you what to do by the numbers. One: Ten-hut! Two: At ease. Three: with your feet spaced eighteen to twenty-four inches apart, do a deep knee bend. Four: stick your head between your legs and push it as far back as it can go. And five: kiss your ass goodbye.

Luddites dance in the streets and burn bitcoin nerds in effigy as Mt. Gox rumbles, explodes and then caves in

Okay, so twenty years ago – we could even make that ten years ago – the headline above would have

appeared to be written in tongues. But technology roars on.

In fact, it not only roars on, it roars over us, smashing, crushing, slicing, chewing up, and spitting out what used to be considered the human side of humanity at a fearsome rate.

Privacy? Forget it. Calling a company you do business with and having a helpful live person who speaks your own language and lives in your own country pick up the phone right off the bat? A quaint, ancient custom, now vanished. Fiercely expensive personal electronic equipment that doesn’t become outmoded and turn into a totally useless piece of junk that creates hazards both to the environment and to your private information? If you yearn for that,                        you must be old enough to be living on Social Security.

And now even our

currency is under fire.

Let’s walk this back a little bit. It says on every U.S. dollar bill in my wallet, “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.”

Oh yeah? Try to use your tender notes to get on a public bus in New York City. Tender paper notes aren't tough enough for today's technology-lubed economy. You’ll get laughed back into the gutter by impatient riders  on the bus waiting for it to move, or standing behind you waiting to get on.

It clearly irks the clerk in my local supermarket whenever I reach for my wallet to pay cash for a head of lettuce, a quart of milk, and a pound of chopped chuck. She has to take the money, clear it with her supervisor if I hand her a $20 bill or higher, make change, yadda yadda, while other people just swipe their credit cards. 

She usually gets even with me by hurriedly piling the receipt, loose bills, and oodles of loose pennies into my palm before I can stop her, one atop the other, and gloating when stuff starts falling on the floor and I have get down on my knees to pick it up.

And now, like the bubonic plague

comes the curse of bitcoin. And Bitcoin.

As if credit cards and debit cards weren’t doing enough to drive up the cost of living by forcing merchants, who pay a commission for accepting plastic, to raise their prices, even that didn't satisfy the finance nerds. They had to go and invent “bitcoin” and also “Bitcoin” (whether it’s capitalized or not changes the meaning, but they're related) – a way to pay for things with “virtual currency.”

I’m not going to explain bitcoin and Bitcoin to you. The whole concept is above my pay grade anyway. If you want an explanation, go here. And if that’s too complicated, try here, and also here. And if you still don’t get it –  or at least don’t get why anyone other than a drug dealer or Mafia money laundry would want to deal with it –welcome to the Neo-Luddite Society, brother or sister. Let’s grab us some sledgehammers and pickaxes and smash those, uh…

Y’see, that’s the trouble. There’s nothing to smash. There’s nothing to grab. The new money is strictly conceptual, represented by a string of ones and zeros that you can’t put in your wallet and carry down the street in your back pocket.

Am I truly a Luddite? 

You’d better believe it. Heck, I don’t even have a smartphone. I don’t twitter. I don’t tweet. I don’t do apps. I don’t even text.  I still take pictures with a camera.

In fact, the only reason I have a klutzy dumb cell phone is because the evil devils at Make-‘Em-Buy-It Central went out one night and vanished all the telephone booths from the streets of America. Now, instead of dropping a quarter in a slot, maybe once or twice a month when I need to make an emergency call, I  am forced pay ­– nickel-dime charges and taxes included – around $45 a month for a minimalist cell phone plan.

But believe me, if the B-coiners of the planet ever sell their bill of goods to a critical mass of gullible consumers, you’ll not only be paying for things with an outrageously volatile currency, you're also gonna yearn for the day when the cable company put you on hold for ninety minutes and then disconnected before you had a chance to say you couldn’t get Channel 2.

So you can imagine my joy,when the Bitcoin and bitcoin world was thrown into total chaos, after the collapse of Mt. Gox.

Mt. whut?

In case, like me, you’re just not into Bitcoin and bitcoin – or maybe now we can start calling it “bitcon” – be advised that Mt. Gox is not a science fiction description of a geological protrusion rising out of a steaming swamp and belching lava in a bad pulp novel, in which mechanical steel robot thingies death ray you from their eyeballs whenever their mechanical eyelids clank open.

No, Mt. Gox is a Bitcoin (or is it "bitcoin" in this case?) exchange, where people trade this synthetic currency. It is – sorry, was – the biggest bitcoin exchange of them all, until it evidently went belly up, reportedly the victim of its own slovenly security practices.

But until it collapsed, it was damn arrogant about how good it was. Here’s a recent quote from them, taken from one of their ads intended for international high financial mucky-mucks:

 These days it seems like everyone is talking about Bitcoin, the digital currency that is revolutionising the way people think about money, trade and transparency. Mt. Gox offers a secure and reliable multi-currency exchange so you can trade with the entire world in your local currency. Now isn’t that something worth talking about?

Oh, Goody! A digital corpse!

Not only did these “secure and reliable” saviors of Mankind’s money go belly up, but even better happened. According to Reuters, the President of the Japan-located Mt. Gox exchange, a man with the remarkably un-Japanese name Mark Karpeles, when asked whether Mt. Gox was dead, offered an e-mail reply that is a masterpiece of Zen, uh …no, not transparency. Impenetrability and vague incoherence is more like it.

It is so poetic in its mysteriously uninformative way (no doubt raising the anxiety among coiners who thought they had hefty digital sums safely stashed in the gorge of Gox) that it deserves to be typeset as a free verse poem. And so I will set it that way:

"We should have an official

announcement ready

soon-ish.

“We are currently at a

turning point for

the business.

“I can’t tell much much

more for now

as this also involves

other parties."

No kidding, dude. I’ll bet some of those “other parties” have smoke coming out of their ears and murder in their eyes.

So let me add a four-line coda:

That rubbing you hear

Comes from Luddites like me

And what we are rubbing

Is our hands with glee.

Semper Snafu! When some low-level Marines behave like crazy idiots and louts, even the top general starts acting nuts.

General Jim Amos justifiably
tried to kick butt over a scan-
dal  but instead kicked up an
even bigger scandal.

Let me start by pointing out that the Marines enjoy something special that none of the rest of us can share.

I first saw it when, as a young man in my 30s, I worked in an advertising agency with old Marines from World War II who had never quite gotten over the experience. 

Their offices always had some kind of Marine memorabilia on display. They shared a bond that most of us could well envy, even if they had fought in different theaters of the Greatest Generation's war. And they shared that bond many decades after their service.

So the Marines, as a rule, have clearly done a lot right in terms of morale and cohesiveness.

That said, it looks as if Marine Commandant General Jim Amos rightfully tried to do something in reaction to the scandalous misbehavior of some Marines in an Afghanistan combat zone, and ended up instead falling into the mess face-first, making himself the focal point of the scandal.

What was the scandal about? The story isn’t pretty. Some Marines, who killed some presumably Taliban fighters, made a video of themselves urinating on the enemies’ dead bodies. Well, warriors do crazy stupid things in combat, but this is just the opposite of what you’d want to happen if you ever hope to win the hearts and minds – or at least not completely alienate the hearts and minds – of the people in whose country you’re fighting.

General Amos nearly had a meltdown.  I understand his justifiable ire, but he evidently did something improper in the course of trying to discipline his troops for this misbehavior.

I’m not going to wallow into the nitty-gritty of this brouhaha. I’m not an expert on military or Marine proprieties, and some of the details have already been reported here. But what happened next shows that misbehaving troops can set off an explosive mess that sends even a well-intentioned general off the deep end.

Seems the Marine Corps Times and other newspapers written for American military audiences saw a scandal in the general’s disciplinary actions and – no surprise here – reported on their findings.

Next thing you know, the General banned the Marine Corps Times from the checkout counter racks at all Marine post exchanges. Yeah, you can still find the paper, if you rummage around for it carefully enough, in the back of the store. But the decision is redolent with the strong whiff of a retaliatory message against a newspaper that reports things as it sees them.

Last I heard, the post exchange stores now “are only authorized to display Marine Corps Exchange promotional materials,” according to the new policy. Exchange managers were told to move the newspapers to make room for the commandant’s reading list and that of the “First Lady of the Marine Corps,” Amos’ wife Bonnie.

And what are some of the books on Marine reading lists? Well, they include some excellent war fiction like Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, “The Red Badge of Courage.” But there’s also a piece of science fiction called ‘Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card. According to the blurb for Ender’s Game ‘In this science fiction novel, child genius Elder Wiggen is chosen by international military forces to save the world from destruction by a deadly alien race.”

Hey, what’s more important to a Marine, deadly alien races or stories in the Marine Corps Times about “everything from career tracks, to pay and benefits, family and spouse issues, and employment after leaving the military?”

Now it’s General Amos whose image is in hot water, not the marines who desecrated enemy bodies. It makes you wonder what’s in another book on the reading list, “How To Excel in a Bureaucracy.”

Self-pity for getting victimized is the new 30

Look, I’m the first to admit it. I’ve wallowed in my own fair share of self-pity. Bad things have

I found this crybaby on a blog called
TheHappyZone.com. Go there and read
"Self Pity: 7 Easy Steps to Quit Feeling
Sorry For Yourself."  Quite a few killers
and billionaire should read it.

.

happened to me, too. For starters (and also for closers, because this piece isn’t really about me) you should have seen my ex-wife’s divorce lawyer.

That said, all the people running around crying “Victim! Boo hoo, I’m a victim!” are beginning  to lie in my stomach like a lump of chicken fat floating atop a pool of vinegar. (Did I just write that awful line? Well, accidents happen. Let’s move on.)

Let me give you a few examples of the stuff that’s stuffing my goat.

“Christlike” George Zimmerman declares himself a “victim.” So reported the New York Daily News the day before I wrote this piece.

“Speaking out for the third time this week, Zimmerman - who has remained the center of controversy since he was acquitted last year of murdering Trayvon Martin - says he plans 'for the worst and hope for the best' in his new life as one of the country's most hated men,” said the Daily News.

Speaking out again? Now wait just a freaking second, George. You strapped a gun around your waist. You left the house, got into your car and began driving around your housing complex, looking for trouble. The closest you could find to trouble was a teen-aged kid named Trayvon Martin, who was coming home with a can of soft drink and a bag of Skittles.

You were immediately suspicious of him because…? You claim it wasn’t because he was black. And not because he was armed, because he definitely was not armed. Perhaps you were suspicious because he had unhealthy snacking habits. You can’t be too careful around those junk food munchers.

You called the cops, who said they didn’t need you to follow him – which you did anyway. Even if I believe your story, that the teen-ager turned on you, a battle ensued, and he was on top of you banging your head on the sidewalk and you shot him in self-defense, you brought this all on yourself.

But there have been followup incidents involving you and your ex-wife, and you and your ex-girlfriend. And both of them involve you pointing weapons at them. When leads me to believe that whenever the going gets the least bit tense, your finger gets an urge to wrap itself around a trigger.

Victim? George, I believe you as far as I could pick you up and throw you – and I to clarify the meaning of that statement, I think I ought to mention that I’m an old geezer with a hernia.

Pitty those totally victimized billionaires

I thank my fellow blogger and mean bully Steve M, who in a recent post on No More Mister Nice Blog called my attention to the suppurating rash of billionaires bleating that they are getting “picked on” for – well, you know, things such as grabbing money from the people who actually do the work to put in their own silk-lined pockets, foreclosing on little old ladies, buying members of Congress like gum balls in a candy store, shipping American jobs abroad so they can be done lots cheaper by abused children, poisoning the nation’s drinking water….need I go on?

I’m not going to get into all the links Steve provided on his February 18th post, headlined, “PARANOID BILLIONAIRES ARE JUST RICH VERSIONS OF GEORGE ZIMMERMAN AND MICHAEL DUNN.”

But one of those links led to a Wall Street Journal piece with a headline that quotes John Mack, former CEO of  former Morgan Stanley CEO as saying, “Stop beating up on Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon.”

Oh, the poor babies! Blankfein let Goldman Sachs bet against its own clients, Dimon let his bank’s own customers get economically, sliced, diced, deep-fried and then served up hot and crispy on elegant foreclosure notices, and both are wallowing in billions as their reward. Beaten up? That’s like the 15 year-old schoolyard bully who whacks a kindergartener over the head with a stick and then screams, “Whaaa! That boy hit me.”

Let me tell you something, you billion dollar pieces of steaming self-pity. If you were behind bars where I’m convinced you belong, you might have an interesting educational opportunity to learn precisely what “getting beaten up” means. And no, it doesn't mean we ought to up the top taxable income bracket another five percent.

Who says you say that I say 

that he said that she said?

Then we have the he-says-she-says, I-say-you-say situation launched – or rather, relaunched – a few weeks ago when New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoff turned his blog over to Woody Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan, for a rehash of a long-disputed j’accuse, concerning alleged abuse of Dylan by Woody back in the 1990s. (God save us from newspaper pundits who can't come up with a new idea.)

In case you just arrived at the incoming flying saucer reception area of JFK after a long exploration of the Planet Pluto, fasten your seat belt again and try to keep your eyes from crossing while I summarize:

Dylan claims Allen abused (raped?) her; the law enforcement people at the time said they had found no supporting physical evidence; the judge in the case came to an inconclusive “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” statement concerning the matter; Woody and Woody’s adopted son Moses claim that Dylan, just an impressionable child at the time, had been rehearsed about the story by Mia Farrrow so many times that it became an implanted memory rather than an actual fact; nobody’s sure whether another Farrow child was actually fathered by Frank Sinatra (and where’s the DNA that would settle this matter one way or another?); a legitimate phenomenon called Parent Alienation Syndrome has been cited, and…and…

Well, you could spend a few hours on this if you were in a deeply masochistic mood. Both sides have now shut up, at least for the moment, but the public is lining up to take sides, like clowns in a Shakespearian comedy whacking one another with pig bladders. Go here, and be sure to read the reams of raging reader commentary that follow the article. I fully expect to see people who have no idea what they're talking about setting out to burn either Woody, or Mia, or Dylan, or Soon Yi, or anybody they can find at the stake. Beware of enraged digerati waving pitchforks.

But I was talking about Washington Monthly readers taking sides. One of those readers commented that the real victim in this case is Dylan, whether you believe she was abused, or you believe the whole sexual abuse thing sprang from the brow of Mia Farrow when her daughter (not Allen’s daughter) Soon Yi Previn and Woody umm, eloped, and that Dylan is Mia’s messed up proxy puppet.

Well, at least Dylan is a victim of somebody-or-other. Not so much so for Zimmerman and The Billionaires. (Hey, that sounds like a long-fogotten rock band that competed with Hootie and the Blowfish.)

I’ll leave you with that, because it’s time for me to leave for the spa and have a long, muddy wallow in the hot self-pity pool.

When one percent of the population holds or controls all the wealth, there is no security. Especially not among the one percent.

Some years ago, in Quito, Ecuador, I noticed that in every wealthy section of town, each house seemed to have at least one armed guard standing at the front door. A few had two armed guards. My driver’s little jest was that the homes with two guards were the homes of the superrich.

I speculated that there would come a time when the superrich would feel threatened by even bigger thugs than they are today.

All that was covered here, in a reminiscence that, in retrospect, I find harrowing, because it turns out, I wasn’t merely speculating. In fact, I might have been pretty close to the mark.

In a piece posted by The New York Times on its blog pages today, two university professors, Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev have revealed their own, statistics-based take on the same dire social consequence of concentrating too much wealth into too few hands. It nearly comes down to equation: the greater the income inequality, the greater the number of people working as security guards or the equivalent. By implication, mutual mistrust among fellow citizens increases, too.

I urge you to read their piece, and then to look into Bowles’ recently-published book on the subject, The New Economics of Inequality and Distribution.

Some of the points Bowles touched on in the blog piece:

• “We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980.”

•“What is happening in America today is both unprecedented in our history, and virtually unique among Western democratic nations. The share of our labor force devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890…”

• “…however one totes up guard labor in the United States, there is a lot of it, and it seems to go along with economic inequality. States with high levels of income inequality — New York and Louisiana — employ twice as many security workers (as a fraction of their labor force) as less unequal states like Idaho and New Hampshire.”

• “There is a simple economic lesson here: A nation whose policies result in substantial inequalities may end up spending more on guns and getting less butter as a result.”

So sleep well, one percenter robber barons. That brief cry you heard below your window just now probably was not one of your security guards having his throat slit by a group of thugs who are about to batter down your door, kidnap you and ship your digits one by one to your negotiators until someone in your retinue comes up with sufficient ransom. 

Again, I said that probably won't happen. Not this year, anyway.

Cross-Posted at No More. Mister Nice Blog

I'm too cranky for my shirt. So shut up!

Lately, I've begun feeling as morose
as this guy

Listen up, Mr. Right Said Fred, author of the song "I'm too sexy." I happen to live in New York. And right now, in New York, nobody's too sexy.

Why? Because of the accursedly miserable weather, that's why! After an endless assault of cold, extra cold,  and extra-extra-cold, not to mention ice storms, snow storms, slush storms, wind storms, blizzards, nor'westers, and miscellaneous additional meterological afflictions, I've had it. I'm fried. I'm frozen. I'm formidably frazzled. I am not, to put it short, in a good mood. I'm not merely a crank these days. I'm crankier than cranky.

Hey, fifty years ago, the forerunners of today's Teaparty fear mongers used to point to Sweden and say, "You see? Sweden has socialism. They even have socialized medicine. And guess what?" There would be a pregnant pause and then the right-winger would pop me with his deadliest bullet. "They have the highest suicide rate in the world!"

But I've come to see, most especially in recent weeks, that socialized medicine has nothing to do with it.  It's the weather, stupid. If you had to spend half your life freezing in the dark of a Scandinavian winter, or trudging through snow and slush,  you too might be tempted to get into bed witha bottle of Aquavit,  a pistol, and Gunilla, and join her in a spirited game of Russian Roulette.

Even down in the Red States, where dinosaurs roamed the forests with Early Man, (i.e., descendants of Adam and Eve) and carbon dated fossils are considered a divine practical joke played on dimwitted scientists, they haven't been able to deny away the weather. Even the Red Staters, now that their trucks and SUVs are skidding and crashing into one another on the Interstates, no longer seem to be denying we're enduring a climate change. It's just the cause of the change that makes them differ with the rest of us. Pollution? Too much carbon in the air? Holes in the Ozone Layer? Don't be silly.

It's all due to "Mother Nature" I heard some Georgia official say on TV this morning while I was brushing my teeth and he was preparing for a tree-busting, powerline-smashing ice storm. Yeah, good old Ma Nature. She's no relation either to God or to climate change. She just a little old lady romping around out there in the snow, in her galoshes and house coat, doing her nasty little thing to the weather.

Hey, I've got a bright idea for the creationists. Pray for sixty degrees and sunny. That way, when the weather finally gets up to sixty and sunny some time this spring, you can say, "Hallelujah! You can't argue with the power of prayer."

And then you can get out of the truck with the pistol you keep in the glove box, and blast Ma Nature right between the eyes. Later you can claim it was self-defense and you were standing your ground.

Just don't tell me about it, please. As you may gather, I'm not in a good mood. Not in the slightest.

Now begone!


                                                                                                                                               

You are on the verge of being blinded to what’s in your food, what’s in your medicine, perhaps even why your electric bill suddenly got bigger. Be very afraid.

Below, two chilling excerpt from  an article by Haley Sweetland Edwards in the Washington Monthly Magazine online. Read the excerpts, shudder, then read the entire terrifying piece here: 

***

"And if industry goes on to win the war—if they collect a body of First Amendment case law establishing that corporations’ First Amendment-protected speech cannot reasonably be fettered by economic regulation—our society will be in a world of hurt. There will be no corporate transparency whatsoever. No way to enforce workers’ rights. No way to compel companies to protect investors or shareholders. And all regulations that require corporate disclosure, including most financial regulations, will cease to exist in any meaningful way."

***

"By claiming that the government cannot, under the Constitution, compel companies to 'engage in speech they would not otherwise issue,' NAM is essentially undercutting nearly alleconomic regulation. 'If that seems alarmist, it’s not,' wrote University of Tulsa law professor Tamara Piety, the author of Brandishing the First Amendment. In the legal context, the current definition of 'speech' is famously fuzzy and could, depending on the situation, include very nearly everything a company does, from advertising and performing financial transactions to transferring data and utilizing computer algorithms. So if NAM’s claim were true, it’s very possible that the government couldn’t regulate any of those activities. 'If you cannot regulate commercial speech,' Piety wrote, 'you cannot regulate commerce, period.'”

If we insist on having a death penalty, let’s at least have a death penalty calculus, too.

California repurposed its old gas
chamber into a lethal injection
chamber. It can be repurposed back
if lethal injections continue to be
"difficult". This photograph originally
posted by a pro death penalty group.

I have no reason to doubt the statistics from an organization called Death Penalty Focus, informing me that, as of this writing, there are 3,108 people sitting on various death rows in the United States, awaiting execution.

The end of each of them is likely to be horrifying. We have come to the point now where, thanks to a dearth of appropriate chemicals for exterminating people, “humane executions” – an oxymoron if ever there was one – are likely to be botched, with the writhing prisoner, belted to a gurney, gasping and choking for breath. 

In a very recent case, the executed prisoner took nearly 25 minutes to die. In fact, to avoid these botches, states are looking for other forms of execution which are sometimes more brutal but also more difficult to screw up, such as firing squads. 

Innocent, but executed anyway

Let’s also not forget that there are now more than a handful of stories concerning the executions of probably innocent people. It’s hard to know how many innocents were really put to death, because innocence is rarely investigated after the fact of execution. We do know that many have been saved from the death chamber by previously unused or suppressed DNA evidence.

Even so, the death penalty isn’t going away. There are too many people emotionally committed to capital punishment, and too many candidates for prosecutors’ offices who will defend it to…well, to the death of somebody else.

Personally, I am strongly opposed to the death penalty in any circumstances, But given that the death penalty is still with us, we ought to at least find better reasons to execute convicted criminals. Or not to execute them.

What we need is an impact formula, a calculus that assigns a level of gravity to the harm done to each of a convicted criminal’s victims, multiplied by the number of victims.

Who should be executed?

Just tally up the score.

Let’s say a criminal needs an impact score of 100 points to be condemned to death. And let’s say we assign only 20 points for a murder. However, we can also assign points for the victim’s pain, suffering and terror. If the victim is held prisoner, and slowly tortured to death, we might assign ten points for each half hour of pain and fear.

We could also add a point or two for the pain, suffering, shock, and loss of happiness of each of the members of the victim’s immediate family. They too are harmed, grievously and permanently, by a loved one’s murder.

If adding up all the points results in a score of 100 or more, that would send the convicted killer to death row.

However, people can suffer grievous harm even if there is no direct murder involved. Suppose someone commits an act, as Bernie Madoff did, that causes elderly people to go from prosperity to near-poverty, or to lose their pensions resulting in remaining years of  anxiety and misery, likely shortening their lives. That might be worth a point. And if 100 people are so affected, Madoff becomes a 100 point candidate for execution.

Follow the formula

In short, the intensity of suffering caused by a deliberate crime, multiplied by the  extensiveness of the suffering, equals a score that determines whether the death penalty should be imposed, regardless of whether a crime is a homicide

Under this formula, a disturbed young man who in a fit of rage lashes out and murders a parent might not face the death penalty. But (for the sake of argument let us assume the guilt of all the accused here) terrorists like Dzhokar Tsarnaev would easily qualify for execution. So would serial killers from Joseph Franklin (executed in 2014) to Richard Speck, (who died in prison of natural causes.)

On the other hand, depending on the extensiveness of the evidence and the weighting of harm done, bankers who until now have been let off with a fine (paid by their stockholders) and then enjoyed a fat bonus a year later might well find themselves on death row, or at least spending their bonuses to defend their lives. Who knows? That might include the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. 

Rand Paul, omelets, and the incredible shrinking Republican alternative healthcare program

In order to make a health care omelet, it may
first be necessary to break the Republican
noise machine.

To start, let me dare to get personal and share a little too much information. I’m shrinking. I’m getting shorter and shorter. That’s not a fantasy. It’s a fact of nature. It’s why vaguely ageist clichés like “little old man” and “little old lady” have crept into the lexicon.

I used to be 5’9”. A couple of years ago, I measured 5’8” in a physician’s office. Yesterday, in the locker room of a gym where I work out, I tragically decided to check again. I’m now, at age 74, roughly a tenth of an inch shy of 5’7”. No wonder some of my old pairs of slacks are too long for me and my bicycle seems too big for me lately.

This leads to a new Crank’s Law: stuff shrinks over time. Not least among that stuff is the Republican alleged replacement for Obamacare. We’ve been hearing a bit lately about how they’re going to get rid of Obamacare, but give us something bigger and better.

This morning, while making breakfast, the television was on in the next room while Senator Rand Paul blustered his way through an interview on Face The Nation, the CBS Sunday blab show. The conversation turned to Obamacare and I suddenly heard Paul blithering on about what big and wonderful plans the Republicans will put in place of Obamacare when they kill it.

I should have dropped my spatula, run for a pen and pad, and taken notes, but that would have ruined the omelet I was making. Given a choice between a crab and goat cheese omelet and Rand Paul, I’ll go for the omelet any time.

Nevertheless, Paul’s big plans quickly shrank to the old and totally familiar. Paul would let health insurance companies sell their insurance products across state lines. What that would lead to, of course, is the sleaziest insurance companies in the least regulated states selling “gotcha” policies that would in time bring health insurance back to the old impractical mess we’ve had for the last half century prior to Obamacare.

As for the rest? Well, that was being worked on, I think I hard Paul say over my own kitchen clatter.

Typical Republican stuff. Promise big, rile ‘em up, then shrink the details down to just the laws that screw people.

Cross posted at No More Mister Nice Blog