HEALTH CARE, GOV. SANFORD & KING OF POP

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Wouldn't it be terrific if the mainstream media gave us such extensive, blockbuster coverage of the travels of Gov. Mark Sanford and the death of Michael Jackson because all the important problems were solved? Wouldn't it be nice if the frivolity of what passes for news meant that we’ve managed to raise Americans' longevity and instant mortality statistics above Third World status?

But no, that's not at all what it means.

Nor does it mean that the global economic meltdown is a problem that's been licked or that we don't have 200,000 troops sitting in the bleakness and danger of the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.

What it means is that the mass media have become bored with corruption, ineptitude, families thrown in the street, dead babies, endless wars, and related issues. Because these circumstances have become more or less permanent, stories about them are of little consequence to the media gatekeepers. They’re much like the no-longer-so-new White House dog. Learn a new trick or get to the end of the news report where you belong.

Such are the rules of pack journalism, whose methods and results ensured that we couldn’t possibly be tipped off before the banking crisis that wrecked the world economy. Mainstream media don't check out stories like that until it's too late. Did you hear them asking back in 2002 why it was so necessary to kick the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq so we could replace them with a shooting war and an endless occupation that drains our resources and weakens our country?

Reporters and their bosses are still out there chasing each others' tails looking for the next O.J. or Nicole Smith. What's the latest hot story eating up thousands of reporter-hours as we speak? The possibility that John Edwards and his mistress made a sex tape. If it doesn't turn up, they'll just go back to their endless follow-ups on Sanford and Jackson.

“The big question,” I heard one of the CNN buffoons say as I fished through channels, “is whether the Sanfords will reconcile.” I asked my wife, “Is that really the big question? Can’t CNN find bigger questions than that?” But she was already heading to the living room to turn on some music and sit down with a book.

Meanwhile, as real news goes unreported, President Obama is day by day worn down by the “moderate” wing of the Democratic Congress (that is, Republicans with a D after their names) who work in tandem with the relig-o-crat greedhead crazies on the Republican side of the aisle. Who's representing the American public, 72 percent of whom want a government alternative to private health insurance and its deranged pre-existing conditions clauses? You tell me.

Sen. Diane Feinstein and her pals have already proclaimed that health care reform would cost $1.7 trillion over the next ten years. So, they say, its goals and methods must be vastly reduced. They get away with repeating this lying horror story because they and their bribe-master corporations know that mainstream media won't check it out.

So let's just look at the hypothetical case of a child running a high fever whose parents are out of jobs, savings, and luck. The parents can’t afford health insurance or a family physician so they take her to a hospital emergency room because by law it must treat her. There she’s diagnosed with swine flu and treated with Tamiflu. But she had to wait ten hours to be treated, and therefore many more patients and their families were needlessly exposed.

In a civilized country she’d have waited less than an hour at a clinic or physician’s office and been properly treated for approximately $200. That $200 is part of Feinstein’s scary story, part of the phantom $1.7 trillion because after all, the government just spent it to help the child. Feinstein doesn’t mention the $1,200 saved by having a rational system in place instead. Nor is this ever mentioned by the insurance or pharmaceutical companies, the AMA, or any of the other powerful lobbies feeding inaccuracies and perverted statistics to the mainstream media. Nor is it mentioned by CNN or Fox, MSNBC, etc., etc. Meanwhile what passes for U.S. health care takes up one-sixth of our gross domestic product while our health statistics are beneath those of Morocco.

Obama, faced with the real math of the “moderate-conservative” coalition in Congress, will most likely agree to water down a health plan to something that Congress's bribe-masters can live with, and we’ll continue suffering under a health care non-system designed to please the corporations that profit from it. And so it goes.

You know something? Maybe it is a better idea to follow the Jackson and Sanford stories. They’re not nearly as depressing.

'LIMBAUGH' BASHES 'THE BARFIGHTER'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
I imagined Rush Limbaugh recently took time out from his busy day chasing OxyContin to interview me about my recently published novel The Barfighter (The Permanent Press). Here’s how it went.

GOLDMAN: Look, Limbaugh, if you want to cross-dress, that’s your business, but that gray sheath is all wrong for you. What kind of look were you going for anyway?

LIMBAUGH: Tell the truth. Don't I look just a little like Streisand?

GOLDMAN: Well, sure, but why --

LIMBAUGH: I’ll ask the questions. What the hell kind of book was that? I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

GOLDMAN: Did you really read it?

LIMBAUGH: Of course.

GOLDMAN: As your half-witted deity Reagan used to say, trust but verify. So tell us the name of the protagonist’s girlfriend.

LIMBAUGH: Okay, so maybe I didn’t read all of it. Why bother? You discovered there’s corruption in boxing? Well duh!

GOLDMAN: The book shows corruption, yes, but that’s not the main thrust at all. Besides, some of what you might call corruption – participation by convicted felons, for example -- isn’t entirely bad. Baseball would never allow an ex-convict to own a team because it’s a sport that tries to present itself as being purer than it actually is. Boxing gives a convicted killer, Don King, a license to promote. He’s still no saint, but the sport gave him a second chance in life. Providing second chances is a fight game tradition.

LIMBAUGH: (Feigns a yawn) Face it. The last thing the world needs is another novel about boxing.

GOLDMAN: Plenty of fine writers have mined the fight world for material, but I felt I had something else to say and did my best to say it. As I wrote I also thought a lot about regret, rumination, and the search for redemption. These are all very human topics that transcend the fight world, and I hope the book does too. My model was Moby Dick, which tells you something about whaling and plenty about the human condition. My premise was based on an experience I had while sparring in a neighborhood gym.

LIMBAUGH: Will we have to suffer through more of your boxing novels?

GOLDMAN: I still write my regular column for The Ring, but when it comes to fiction, I think I said all I wanted to say about boxing in The Barfighter.

LIMBAUGH: Who cares what you have to say? I’ve sold more books than you could even dream of selling, and to me they’re just a sideline.

GOLDMAN: Sure, you’ve peddled ghost-written titles seeped in your own cruel brand of pretentious ignorance, but there’s still room in this world for people who write their own books and for publishers trying to put out worthy titles. I try not to worry about no-talent jerks like you who hit it big. I prefer to focus on fine artists like John Updike and Joseph Heller who achieved great success.

LIMBAUGH: Then why did you choose me to conduct this interview?

GOLDMAN: Because you’re an interesting though repulsive phenomenon.

LIMBAUGH: Listen, climb soapboxes on your own time. I’ve got an appointment to sign some more multi-million-dollar contracts.

GOLDMAN: Proving once again how important it is to keep one’s sense of humor. Did I mention The Barfighter is also humorous?

LIMBAUGH: So it’s not a serious book.

GOLDMAN: It’s a mistake to believe we can take fiction seriously only when it’s devoid of humor. This widespread delusion is what makes it practically impossible, for example, for a comedy to win the Best Picture Oscar. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Kafka – not exactly lightweights – all incorporated humor in their work. Humor is an essential ingredient to living well. I’m particularly aware of this as I look at you, Limbaugh. If we had to take you seriously there’d be lots more people walking in front of busses. But I think I’ll stop right here because I did end up climbing on a soapbox, and when you prove Limbaugh correct about anything it’s time to quit.
(The Barfighter can be purchased at a discount from Amazon.com.)

OBAMA LETS FINANCIAL DOGS OUT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
When President Obama went looking for a CIA director he settled on Leon Panetta, a smart, tough bird who knows his way around and also had minimal ties to the intelligence community.

But when Obama needed helpers to figure a way out of our economic quagmire, he followed an opposite strategy, choosing Wall Streeters from within the club. Not surprisingly, their lofty perspectives gave them no clue as to what’s going on down here in the financial sludge where the rest of us reside. Timothy Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, and Lawrence Summers, who heads Obama’s National Economic Council, have spent their entire lives inside the same privileged enclaves that gave birth to our economic ruin. They didn’t come into office questioning the structure that suckled them. Like their predecessors in the Bush Gang, they’ve been passing acres of cash to the same scumbags and idiots who gambled away the global economy. Now Geithner and Summers have developed a scheme designed to be so complex that we won’t understand what they’re doing while they pass on more trillions to the criminally insane. More on that later.

In a previous column I zeroed in on Summers. Now let’s take a better look at this Geithner person who supposedly supervises the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Geithner, whose father held an earldom in the Ford Foundation, went straight from college to the sinister lobbying outfit operated by Doctor Death himself, Henry Kissinger. Its primary purpose is to gain influence in Washington for a super-secret list of clients that you can bet never included Mother Teresa. After soaking up lethal doses of amorality there, Manchurian Candidate Geithner joined the entourage of Robert Rubin and Summers, who, with the aid of Alan Greenspan and others, set TNT under New Deal banking regulations, destroying the world economy and making lots and lots of money for themselves and their friends. Inside the sweet circle, Geithner climbed up to Treasury awhile, then the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Federal Reserve. There, as late as 2007, he was working to reduce capital requirements for banks so they could shoot craps for even higher stakes with other people’s money.

When the financial structure he’d helped to debase came apart, Geithner was well-known as a Fed hawk in favor of guaranteeing virtually all the banks’ IOU’s and asking virtually nothing in return. After returning to Treasury, he’s continued the class war against 99.8 percent of Americans. The $6.4 trillion question is why Obama lets Geithner, Summers, and the same old flatulent financiers regulate themselves and call the shots. Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch, for example, the firms that awarded triple-A status to trillions in worthless paper, are still paid by the companies whose financial instruments they’re supposed to rate.

Obama has certain goals he clings to – such as reforming the health-care non-system that forced his mother on her death bed to battle insurance company gnomes contending the cancer killing her was no business of theirs. On other matters Obama often compromises. Only last month he sat on his hands while the banks, after paying their usual legalized bribes to Congresspeople, managed to mutilate a bankruptcy reform bill. Where did they get the money to pay these bribes? From us, of course. Outraged Senator Dick Durbin of Illionis stated flatly that the banks still "own" Capitol Hill. Now once again they focus on their own short-term gains and wreck their institutions from within, figuring the long-term will take care of itself with more public funds. The government owns huge blocks of stock in "troubled" banks that brought on their own troubles, but Geithner has made no move to put individuals representing us, the taxpayer-stockholders, on their boards. Board members are still insiders like Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who used to make approximately $300,000 annually for attending four to five Freddie Mac meetings a year and look the other way while it filed financial reports that were later ruled fraudulent even by the notoriously see-no-evil Securities Exchange Commission.

By blocking legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to jawbone down mortgage principal, banks owned by us the people will continue to torture underwater families. At the same time they create new foreclosures that make their bad paper worth even less, but that's the way they've always done it: Pay off Congress with relatively small bribes so they can harass widows, orphans, and other rabble.

Would you rather let the financially troubled family stay in that house down the block with a reduced mortgage or kick them out and create another vacant house that's a sitting duck for vandals and thieves?

Unlike Obama, Geithner and his ilk don’t compromise. They take all they can get, and without apology. Geithner’s TARP plan is to get super-rich speculators to buy rotten assets by guaranteeing their investments against loss. This will set the prices artificially high, earning profits for scumbags on both ends of the deal. This money, just like the bankers' bribe money, also comes from us.

Yes, we should ask Obama why he loosed the financial dogs on us. But we should also ask ourselves why we allowed him to open the gate. Actually, the answer’s not hard to find. Leonard Cohen already explained it: “Everybody knows the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.”

If you still have twenty dollars left to spend, consider buying my new novel The Barfighter (The Permanent Press; 2009).

THE BARFIGHTER EXCERPT AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NOVELS, SOCKET WRENCHES

The American Library Association just nominated my novel The Barfighter, released this month by The Permanent Press, as a 2009 Notable Book. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 12. Beneath that is a comment on the marketing of fiction in the 21st century corporate world.

The hardest part about being tutored by Philyaw was not staring at him. That’s because he looked like Humphrey Bogart.

Philyaw looked so much like Bogey that no one would believe it without actually seeing it, and even then they had a hard time believing it. It was said he’d caused fender-benders just walking down a sidewalk. Cheskis marveled that Philyaw, rather than trying to alter his looks, embraced them, smoking old-fashioned, no-filter cigarettes and dressing like Bogey --- in a forties hat and rumpled trench coat. In 1985 this apparel would be rare anywhere, but in Southern California it was rarer than bar mitzvah bacon.

“What could he possibly do to look less like Humphrey Bogart?” Lorraine said to Cheskis after she’d consented once and only once to accompany Cheskis to the fights.
“He could wear an iron mask,” Cheskis responded. “Then he’d look like the Man in the Iron Mask instead of Humphrey Bogart. But I guess that wouldn’t improve things much, would it?”
Philyaw had once managed the most promising middleweight on the West Coast. But the kid’s bright future was irreparably harmed the night he carelessly stopped a hail of police bullets with most of his vital organs while running out of a liquor store he’d just held up in the Crenshaw District. It was rumored around the neighborhood that a secret room of a doughnut shop on Pico had photographs on the wall that showed the cops taking turns posing with their ski-masked middleweight corpse as though he were a prize elk. Some even claimed the head was mounted in the basement of the 77th Street Station.

They said Philyaw took the death harder than the kid’s mother. Maybe because she didn’t have to pick up the funeral tab. He’d been shelling out cash for years to build the kid’s career. The liquor store misadventure landed on Philyaw just as he was poised to pull the lever on a middleweight jackpot. Philyaw, who’d heretofore denied any resemblance to Bogart, disappeared after the funeral and eventually came back in his Sam Spade get-up with a Camel dangling from the corner of his lips. No one understood the meaning of this turnaround and no one confronted Philyaw about it directly. It was too easy to envision him grabbing the gat in his trench coat and casually plugging his inquisitor like Bogey did to Major Strasser at the end of Casablanca.

The Barfighter received strong reviews in Booklist, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly, but you’re unlikely to find it on the shelves of either Borders or Barnes & Noble, the two giants that have crowded out most other bookstores. The chains charge publishers for display space, and small publishers that either can’t afford or justly refuse to pony up these kickbacks are crowded out. Chains follow this questionable business practice because they have little to no interest in the content of their wares, which might just as well be cabbages or socket wrenches.

The Barfighter can be ordered from the publisher at http://www.thepermanentpress.com/bookdisp.ihtml?id=528 or at a discount from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579621821/ref=s9_sims_gw_s1_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0Z5J03STBW17A3XWXKE8&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846
Should you pass this blog around to those who might be interested or ask a store or two to stock the book, you’ll get no grief from me. Thanks.

HOW TO SOOTHE SAVAGE (LITTLE KIMMY) JONG IL

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Pipsqueak loon Kim Jong Il, who, like certain previous U.S. presidents we could name, inherited his job from his daddy, is clearly trying to keep himself in the news. He's not willing to settle for the fifteen-minute fame coined by Andy Warhol. He's set on making the big time -- Springsteen- or Bono-class celebrity. Lasting and with a touch of hysteria. This gives us an opening, and if we do a little creative thinking we can use it. More on that below.

Little Kimmy’s missile launch seemed perfectly timed for a news media already bored with the European crowds turning out for Obama yet unwilling to go back to focusing on the same old credit default swaps, bonuses, bailouts, and new batches of homeless people. So they spent two or three excited days stewing over the missile launch out of North Korea even though it appears the test failed. Remember the time Kim’s K-Mart nuke just kind of fizzled like a bad match? Still, we can’t afford to have a poorly triggered nuke carried by a not-terribly-well-engineered missile flying over some civilized country the next time Kimmy finds himself ignored.

Okay, here’s what we do. Kim, reminded of his mortality by a stroke not long ago, clearly yearns to be immortalized in some way that reaches beyond communist statuary. Everybody knows there’s no fame to equal rock star fame. So why not ask U2 or the E Street Band to invite him into the band and go on tour with them? Whoever goes out there next. Intelligent rockers like them will instantly understand it’s better to have a maniac with a goofy haircut banging a tambourine at stage left than to have him blowing up parts of Japan or South Korea.

This is a win-win situation. It won’t hurt the band’s ticket sales, Kimmy finds fame beyond his maniacal dreams, the audience gets a little comic relief along with the music, and the standard news media get themselves a terrific story with loads of photo ops that maybe they can understand. Heck, if Billy Ray Cyrus had put Prince George up on stage with a toy drum we might have avoided the Iraq War.
(Please don't forget to buy several cases of my newly released novel The Barfighter available now from Amazon, The Permanent Press, and elsewhere.)

HOW ONE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE STILL SCREWS US

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
We’re being told, as one Republican congressional member said it, that President Obama is taking America on a hard left turn. Actually he’s trying to take back only a part of what zealous right-wingers have stolen from us over the last forty years, such as union rights and a more progressive tax system. Right now the top income tax rate is 35 percent for the wealthiest taxpayers. As recently as the Kennedy Administration that figure was 91 percent. That is not a misprint.

More on that another time. Now I’m going to squawk about two inexplicable Obama mistakes. The first was making Lawrence Summers director of the White House Economic Council. This powerful position is now filled by a fat fool who leaves a trail of horrors everywhere he goes. Yet he keeps getting promoted to higher positions. He’s like the eye of a hurricane. Nothing personally touches him, but everything around him gets smashed into bloody toothpicks. But that’s not even the worst of it because now he gets to go around defending and perpetuating his blunders. All of which is very, very bad for the United States of America.

As a protégé of turd-mongering bandit Robert Rubin, Summers (pictured above) was one of the principal destroyers of the global economy, but if you ask him about it, he’ll tell you he did everything right. Summers pushed through the emasculation of the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act that had prohibited investment bank/brokers, insurance companies, and traditional banks from mingling their businesses. That’s because there are inherent conflicts of interests among them. If it ain’t broke, you shouldn’t fix it, but the financial greedheads who hated Glass-Steagall poured money into Congress and into the hands of then-President Bill Clinton to take apart the New Deal legislation. In 1999 they got their wish while Summers, who’d been Rubin’s deputy, was Secretary of the Treasury. "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers announced.

This barely reported giant step into darkness (few journalists understood it) turned loose banks, insurance companies, and brokers to engage in just about any business they wanted – businesses they knew nothing about, including the underwriting of a treacherous vehicle called the credit default swap. It basically insured the losses of crap-shooting masters of the universe even though the guarantors had no way to pay up and no way to disentangle the crazy derivatives they created. Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, possibly the dumbest bastard in America, looked for new ways to deregulate other greedy bastards like himself who were almost as dumb as he is.

Rubin became CEO of one of the grateful hydra-monsters his initiative set loose upon the globe and went on to make barrels of money as his Citigroup traded the new, exotic derivatives made crazier by the legislation he'd spawned as a “public servant.” Unlike some of those AIG execs, he hasn't given back any of his tainted dollars. Meanwhile Summers, basking in the light of greed and idiocy, supported Republican initiatives to cut taxes for the rich, including taxes on capital gains, so we now have gardeners and housemaids taxed at a higher rate than the gazillionaire investors who employ them.
When Enron and other thieves looted California because the looters were able to buy off the Legislature and deregulate utilities, Summers complained it wasn't working out because there needed to be even more deregulation.

As he advises the President, Summers has an agenda in direct conflict with the nation’s, and he’s repeatedly shown his willingness to piss on everybody while he tells us it’s raining perfume. He shouldn’t be let anywhere near a government of the people.

Second thing Obama’s doing wrong: You can’t fix health care if you barely mention the insurance companies taking nearly half the dollars spent on health care. Get real, Barack. Tackle the giants.

In the midst of all these problems, I have a suggestion. Curl up with a good book. You might try my novel The Barfighter, set for April release by the Permanent Press. These books make excellent Father’s Day and Mother’s Day gifts. You might want to buy several boxes and pass them around this Christmas instead of cards. Find out more at http://www.thepermanentpress.com/bookdisp.ihtml?id=528

GIVE OBAMAS CREDIT FOR PICKING UP THEIR OWN CHECKS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
It’s getting less and less likely that big-time news media will notice or point out information we ought to have. For example, when’s the last time you saw any of them try to get an honest accounting of how politicians spend their campaign contributions? A good three-fourths of our congresspeople hold ultra-safe, gerrymandered seats, yet they spend approximately half their workday raising millions and millions they don’t need to run campaigns they can’t lose. Something's fishy. But I’ve already digressed from my topic, which is to point out something telling about Barack Obama that I haven't seen pointed out.
For their well-earned pre-inaugural vacation the Obama family rented an estate in Hawaii. Just about no one noticed the significance at play. Liberal columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, for example, tried to make a point but missed entirely. Krugman actually castigated Barack for taking an ostentatious vacation. But he failed to notice that the Obamas paid for it themselves.
The Bushes, though they loved getting away from the White House, don’t enjoy travel, so they mostly went back to their own place in Texas, (a "ranch" that raises nothing) stayed with Daddy in Kennebunkport, or went to the presidential compound at Camp David. None of that was unethical. We can only speculate how Junior would have behaved if he were intelligent and curious enough to take more venturesome vacations. But let’s skip that topic and go back a notch to the president before him, namely Bill Clinton.
Bill and Hillary would walk a mile to avoid picking up a check of any kind. The Clintons enjoy travel – real travel. They just hate paying for it. The media never honed in on all the vacation freebies the Clintons grabbed – and still grab in their post-White House phase. We always get the destinations, but no one hones in on the particulars that count.
When the Clintons go to Martha’s Vineyard, they stay at the Robert S. McNamara mansion. When they hanker for the Dominican Republic, they take over the estate of Oscar De La Renta. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming they lodge in the elaborate digs of industrialist and financier Max C. Chapman. See a pattern here? The Clintons paid not one cent for any of this. They are confirmed, out-of-the-closet schnorers. That’s a Yiddish word that’s usually translated as “beggars.” But the word means more than that. A schnorer is fifty percent con-artist, fifty percent-beggar, and one hundred percent pain in the ass. A moocher, a parasite, a freeloader. A schnorer is the guy who’s always trying to get something for free, even if he doesn’t want it that much. The pursuit of making someone else pay is his chief delight.
When the Obamas looked for a place to vacation they didn’t pull down the list of ultra-rich jerks always looking for favors and willing to pay for them. (You could argue it's the taxpayers who actually do the paying, since their interests are sacrificed in order to pay off the hosts) The Obamas opened the Yellow Pages and rented the place, fair and square, just like anyone else would do. That’s a strong indicator of the changes we’re witnessing in this White House. The people at the top of this administration must adhere to the strongest anti-influence-peddling code we’ve seen in the modern age, and aides have their salaries frozen. Ethics. What a concept.
So no, the Obamas don’t stay at Motel 6, but hey, they actually earned their money. Most of it comes from Obama’s books, which he wrote himself. No ghost writers. That’s another form of integrity that nowadays is positively unique among public figures.
I won’t try to list all the other admirable things the Obamas are doing at this point. I just wanted to point out that they aren’t schnorers, and for this they deserve credit.