LESSONS FROM JOE HELLER FOR 2010

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Looking at the state of our nation at the close of the year, stuck in two wars with a broken-down economy that deals cards from a stacked deck –- not to mention a crumbling ecology -- I recommend looking back at Picture This, a novel by Joseph Heller that came out in 1988.

By virtue of being a Heller novel, it received good attention at the time. But then it faded into the netherworld of barely remembered art. Picture This is a brilliant, meditative, enchanting work teeming with ideas that very much relate to the situation we’re in right now. The story bounces around even more than Heller’s Catch 22, stopping at times and places that include Socrates’s jail cell in Athens, Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What ties it together are the stories and thoughts he weaves out of one painting, Rembrandt’s masterpiece Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

When we think of ancient Greece we tend to see it as the birthplace of democracy, but Heller, taking a hard look at its principal city state of Athens, can’t help noticing that its society was based on two pillars: war and slavery. The place was run by men who espoused generosity as they put the fix in to pile up more wealth for themselves and screw everyone else, including the thoroughly exploited youngsters they sent off to fight in grim, crazy wars. Heller juxtaposes this abysmal stream of hypocrisy, greed, and violence against the saving power of art, and while he does it he reminds us of the value of humor in our everyday lives.

When we elected Barack Obama as president I, like many of us, looked forward to a more decent society free of what the winning candidate called “dumb wars,” a government that would work toward justice at home and abroad. Where we are now is better than where we’d be under McCain. The odds are good that his blundering administration would have sunk us into Great Depression II instead of the near-Depression economy that’s choking us now. But you don’t need me to tell you we’re not in a good place. People are plunging into joblessness and homelessness. The promise of a decent education and civilized system of health care for our children fades.

Amazingly, we’re still stuck in Iraq while Obama ramps up the nothing-to-win war in Afghanistan, and he does it with a “volunteer” military, many of whose members are in uniform because no one else would offer them a job with benefits. Many of these kids are going batty from the repeated war deployments. There is no end game in Afghanistan. Obama’s generals have persuaded him we must remain as conquerors and call ourselves something else, and if the Afghans don’t like it, we’ll just have to kill more of them.

The statements coming out of this administration on the war there present new contradictions almost every day. We’re not nation building, we are nation-building, we’re there to get Al Qaeda, we’re there to get the Taliban, or we’re there to buy off the Taliban. Or we're in Afghanistan because we want to get the bad guys in Pakistan. We’re there to support Karzai or no, Karzai doesn’t matter. Well, Karzai does matter because he runs one of the most corrupt regimes on earth and has done so for eight years now with our backing. Yet we’re supposed to believe that the Afghans will believe this bandit chief will now rise above reproach along with his heroin-dealing family.

In Iraq, when Maliki postpones an election, we postpone withdrawal. He’s our marionette, and yet he pulls the strings, as does Karzai. Hours after Obama implied something vague about pulling out of Afghanistan down the road someday he was flatly contradicted by his own secretaries of defense and state and also Karzai. No, we never got to vote on it, but Afghanistan is our 52nd state. It and Iraq, which of course is No. 51, eat up more of our resources than any ten states together.
To deal with our economy and the crooked bankers who wrecked it with their greed, Obama hired a bunch of crooked bankers. And guess what? They’re tilting everything in favor of crooked bankers. It’s been more than a year since the collapse and we have no reforms. The crooks are still dealing derivatives with our money, and another meltdown looms. Then there’s health care.

The health care bills in the Senate and House are tilted toward insurance and drug companies and the designs of the conservative American Medical Association. They’re all going to get even richer. Members of Congress who shout the loudest about fiscal responsibility are the very same members who have stripped all pricing controls out of the hamburger meat they’ve made of the legislation. Meanwhile the big "news" media spend their resources chasing after Tiger Woods's mistresses.

That’s why I like to pick up books like Picture This, which remind me none of this is new. That’s depressing and comforting at the same time. I respect people who keep fighting the good fight, who try to save us from the worst of the worst, and I hope for a good outcome. Meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt to follow Heller’s lead and enjoy the art that’s all around us.

The American Library Association has nominated Ivan G. Goldman’s latest novel The Barfighter as a 2009 Notable Book. Link to information at

http://www.thepermanentpress.com/ and do a search. It's there, at Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Powell's Books, and elsewhere.

And watch for his forthcoming novel Exit Blue, a political satire coming out from Black Heron in March 2010. Link to information at

http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Blue-Ivan-G-Goldman/dp/0930773942/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257984700&sr=1-4

KARZAI IS NO LINCOLN -- HE'S NOT EVEN AN EDSEL

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
The Obama Administration is telling wayward, dictatorial, corrupt Hamid Karzai to take on a new persona and become a champion of democracy, decorum, and decent, honest government.

Has anyone examined the premise of this demand with simple logic? What we’re asking is for Al Capone to take over Mother Teresa’s charity work. For starters, Karzai’s in league with his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. Two senior officials in the Obama Administration told the New York Times that Ahmed is a powerful heroin trafficker. You don’t sell heroin in a place like Afghanistan using clean methods. You corrupt some people, you terrorize and kill others. The Afghan government under Hamid Karzai is run like the NYPD of the seventies, when station houses passed around payoffs like precisely measured gumdrops.

Bear in mind that not only are we supposed to expect this guy to change his leopard’s spots. So are everyday Afghans, many of whom risked their lives to vote in the last election, which he then stole with such pathetic obviousness that it was embarrassing. They’ve been watching him govern for eight years. They know what’s possible and what isn’t. Can you imagine George W. Bush, after running things the way he did for two terms, suddenly transforming himself into Abraham Lincoln? Because that’s what we’re all expected to believe will happen in Afghanistan.

Bush handed Karzai a job and Karzai, like so many of Bush’s appointees in his administration, screwed it up beyond our lowest expectations. We can’t ask Afghans to support this guy, and we certainly can’t ask U.S. troops to fight and die for him. And we have no one else to turn to. We could stay there and hope that a massive, terribly expensive effort from us will improve things during the next two or three decades (while our troops keep taking casualties) or we can recognize reality and put our resources to better use elsewhere. Afghanistan is too broke for us to fix.

WHAT BLUE DOGS REALLY WANT -- AND WHY THEY RULE

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Blue dogs claim they oppose the “public option” in any health care bill because they defend moderation in spending. In reality, a public health option, by presenting insurance company leeches with price competition, would moderate spending. Blue dog Democrats don’t favor a rational budget. They’re front-line champions of the busted financial structure championed by the corporations that pay them off. If these guys cared about a balanced budget, why did they cut taxes for the super-rich while they supported Bush’s $2 trillion war in Iraq?

The blue dogs’ buddies, their Republicans across the aisle, oppose any health bill in any form whatsoever because protecting insurance company profits isn’t enough for them. They, like their pill-addled hero Rush Limbaugh, want the Obama presidency to fail and the country to sink further into the poisonous swamp of lunacy fashioned from nearly three decades of domination by the corrupt, crazy remnants of what used to be the Party of Lincoln.

What’s fascinating is that the corporate greedheads that form the dominant Republican and Blue Dog coalition can find thousands of brainless foot soldiers to take to the streets in favor of a failed health structure ruled by insur-o-crats. But anything or anyone that opposes Obama is something these “You lie!” zombies can root for. Life was so much simpler when they had their “colored” drinking fountains. The only reason the tea-party nutsos call Obama a socialist is because they understand it’s no longer acceptable to call him a nigger (outside the comfort of their own little enclaves).

Almost equally confounding is how the Big Media can so consistently fail to look into the records and finances of the politicians on the take from the global companies that make the rules. MSNBC (that is, the GE Corporation) provide us with would-be comics like Keith Olberemann and Rachel Maddow to smirk their way through the nightly news, but they don’t hire real journalists who dig up facts. They figure we’ll be satisfied with vaudevillean, liberal counterparts to O’Reiley, Lumbaugh, etc. If these made-up TV clowns on the left or right had to chase down a real story they’d probably burst into flames.

Our country limps along on a constitution that bestows tremendous power on rural constituencies that elect people like the South Carolina governor who figured he could pave his way to the presidency by turning down federal funds to help unemployed people. Montana’s Max Baucus, who’s been screwing around for months to formulate a health plan that would supposedly be acceptable to Republicans, represents a state that has far fewer residents than Brooklyn. But it gets two senators. If we lived in a genuine democracy, a voter in Wyoming wouldn’t have ninety times the political clout of a voter in Long Beach, California. Imposters like Baucus and his blue dog pals wouldn’t be in the catbird seat.

WHY WE’RE IN AFGHANISTAN AND WHAT WE SHOULD DO ABOUT IT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

There’s no light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel. In fact, there’s not even a tunnel, just a deep, dark pit. We have no clear mission there, and after eight years of fighting we’re suffering more casualties than ever while the place remains deeply mired in violence and corruption.

A British newspaper recently published an interview with Britain's next military chief Gen. Sir David Richards in which he is quoted as saying that the Afghanistan mission could last up to 40 years. As it stands now, NATO has more than 100,000 troops there, 58.000 of them Americans. Another 10,000 U.S. troops will be added by year end. And those figures are misleadingly low because at last count we had 74,000 military “contractors” in country, most of them performing chores ordinarily done by soldiers.

The painfully slow withdrawal from Iraq (We still have 128,000 troops there) coupled with all those additional forces being injected into Afghanistan means that the same soldiers and Marines are deployed over and over again until they come back in body bags or with pieces missing, burned, or otherwise mutilated. Meanwhile the long, frequent absences wreck the emotional health of service people and their families, engendering divorce, alcoholism, and all the related negative outcomes that go with them.

What’s going on? Barack Obama’s not this stupid, is he? So why is he dumping all these troops down the Afghanistan hole? The answer is both simple and ugly. We’re there because if he pulls out and there’s another attack on the U.S. that approximates 9/11-magnitude, his presidency could be toast. Ever since they lost the 2008 election Republican leaders have made it clear that they’re itching for another successful attack on America so they can use it to win elections. And if such an attack were traced back to Afghanistan in any way after Obama had pulled out, they figure they’d be hitting the trifecta. Meanwhile, they took no responsibility for being in charge on 9-11, but that's how they play the game.

If Republican leaders were civilized patriots, Obama could get them to buy into a joint congressional resolution supported by both parties that would give him cover for withdrawal, leaving only intelligence and police operatives plus special forces teams to harass enemy movement along the Pakistan border. But Republicans have moved too far to the right in the last couple decades to even contemplate pursuing a rational, bipartisan agenda. They’ve politicized prayer, sex, and war, among other things, and rather than pull our troops from a quagmire that threatens to dwarf the Vietnam disaster, they prefer to let them die and possibly provide Republican political dividends.

We can expect General Stanley McChrystal, who’s in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, to announce in the coming days or weeks that he’s changing the strategy to one of winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese – excuse me, I mean Afghans -- and to pretend that no one’s thought of that before. In fact, unless Obama changes the script, we can expect a succession of U.S. generals and lots of parrot-class commentators to say this for many years to come.

But the enemy has controlled much of the country for years and is well funded by an abundant opium crop that neither U.S. forces nor the Karzai regime has been able to do much about. In fact, Karzai's clique is itself riddled with opium traffickers and people who play both sides. Al Qaeda-born terrorism will be defeated by good intelligence and police work, not a never-ending occupation in a lost, hellish country whose only real talent is for resisting occupation by foreign troops.

But if Obama is truly convinced we must defeat the Taliban on the field of battle then he should involve all of America, not just that tiny sliver represented by military families. He must explain why victory is so important and then immediately re-establish military conscription so we can field a half a million troops in Afghanistan. Only this time the draft mustn’t be rigged to protect the offspring of the rich and powerful.

If he’s unwilling to do all that, he must withdraw, because anything less will fail and it’s crazy to continue sacrificing our troops for domestic political requirements. Just because Republicans pursue a loony agenda that’s no reason to oppose them with the same measure of lunacy.

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.

BUSH, CHENEY VERSUS IRAQ FACTS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As they make ready to slink out of Washington, Cheney, Bush, and the rest of their duplicitous band of blunderers and criminals are burning their documents and preparing the foundations for the fantasy memoirs that their ghost writers will create for them. And in a series of pre-departure interviews they’re giving us their latest talking points on the centerpiece of their disastrous rule -- the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Their preposterous claims can be disproved just by looking at the facts, but oddly, the journalists interviewing them never do that. Asking all the wrong questions, they just sit at the feet of these lying fools wagging their tails like spaniels.
Cheney, for example, says everything worked out fine, including the policy of torture, and Bush blames everything on bad intelligence. Neither is challenged by the TV “journalist” across from him.
This makes it all the more important to look at the facts now while they're still warm. When General Eisenhower's troops came across the Nazi death camps he immediately understood that the perpetrators and their apologists would later try to deny the facts and alter history. So within hours of the discovery he ordered his troops to shoot film, gather evidence, and seek out those responsible.
We need to do the same about the Iraq War. So let’s look at the record, which, by the way, gives some absolution to those members of Congress who originally authorized the invasion.
"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is (sic) a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration," Bush told Charles Gibson.” (ABC's Gibson is the same phony imbecile who decided Barack Obama's nonexistent link to the Weatherman radicals of the 1970s was the central question of the 2008 election and devoted much of a Democratic debate to mucking through this delusion) Bush also told tail-wagging Gibson, "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." He also no doubt wishes the facts were different. Here they are.
Congress authorized the attack on October 11, 2002. The administration claimed at the time it needed to show its teeth in order to get inspectors in there. The joint resolution, the Bushies told Congress, was necessary in order to avoid war. On November 8, the U.N. imposed tough new arms inspections on Iraq. Now here’s the really interesting part. Ten days later, weapons inspectors dispatched by the U.N. returned to Saddam-land for the first time in almost four years. Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney passed the word to the Pentagon to prepare for an invasion, and by March 2003, had 200,000 troops surrounding Saddam.
But the inspectors led by the experienced Hans Blix couldn’t find anything. Saddam, growing more frightened, steadily gave way to Blix’s demands. U.N. inspectors could travel anywhere they liked without giving advance notice, and they could do it in helicopters so there could be no phony traffic jams to impede them.
Blix still couldn’t find anything. Increasingly skeptical and verbally attacked day in and day out by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their flunkies, Blix publicly asked the Bush administration to share its intelligence so he could dig up these phantom weapons of mass destruction. No response. Something was very fishy.
On March 14, Bush and Tony Blair gave up on securing enough Security Council votes to invade. Bush told the inspectors to leave so they wouldn’t get in the way of the invasion. Blix and his able crew left under protest, and March 17, Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to leave the country. The invasion commenced.
For years afterward the Bush-o-crats claimed they had to invade because Saddam wouldn’t let in inspectors. And the mainstream news media failed to challenge them. It felt like we were living in the old Soviet Union, where news was bent so drastically by the country's media that it was a running joke. Now Bush, buttressed by this crazy reporting he's grown so used to, blames faulty intelligence. But how could “intelligence” filtered through his propaganda machine trump inspectors who were there on the ground? Had he let the inspectors continue their work, many hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed might instead be living the lives they had a right to.
In 2005, the Downing Street Memo came to light, the smoking gun that revealed Bush and Blair had already decided to invade Iraq sometime before the memo date of July 23, 2002, using WMD as an excuse. The case was “thin,” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This ultra-secret memo was never contested by Blair.
Why did Bush really invade? Alan Greenspan, an expert on global privateering and a booster of same, conceded the war had always been about oil. Bush talked about invading Iraq ten days after inauguration, at his very first meeting of the National Security Council. That was eight months before the Nine-Eleven attack he liked to blame on Saddam. Most of the time he used stylized sentences written for him by his handlers that implied the accusation without quite uttering it.
All the above is hard fact, not supposition, and of course should be the basis of interviews with the seedy, lying psychopaths at the center of this demented, wrecking ball of a war that turned out to be a snipe hunt.
What follows is mostly theory, but with plenty of evidence to back it up ---
The war decision had much to do with the November 2004 elections. Bush Junior desperately wanted to show up his Daddy, who’d invaded Iraq but left Saddam in place. Also, Junior, who harbors a hard-core Oedipal love-loathing for his father, was conscious that the murderous Saddam had once plotted to assassinate Bush Senior.
Bush Junior liked to brag he was “a wartime president” and assumed he would score a great victory (even though there had been virtually no planning for post-Saddam Iraq) and cement his place in history at least above Daddy and possibly alongside Lincoln and Washington. Junior also seemed to really believe that it was his duty to attack America's enemies. Though a history major at Yale, evidently he'd remained uninformed about the Cold War of nearly fifty years that never led to an all-out hot war between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.
There’s more than enough evidence to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rice et al for their crimes so no future administration will try to repeat them anywhere at any time. And in the future, any "journalist" who even touches on this subject should use the facts or be fired because such gruesome media incompetence is as indefensible as the crimes themselves.