Sunday, May 31, 2009

'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.)

Sunday, May 03, 2009

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).