AN ADMIRAL'S INSUBORDINATION AND OTHER EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Here's something extraordinary: Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently echoed the tea-partiers' claim that the greatest threat to our nation is its national debt, meaning that we must kill all programs conservatives don’t like, including Social Security.

Remarkably, no one in the big-time media or the Obama Administration noticed the significance of Mullen’s remarkably insubordinate, gratuitous statement. Apparently this guy's setting up a political campaign inside the Pentagon.

It's also extraordinary that Obama has followed in Nixon's footsteps by expanding a pointless, hopeless war that he inherited from a predecessor, particularly since it's clear if we leave Afghanistan 10 days from now or 10 years from now the result will be the same.

It's extraordinary that the Obama Administration expects Afghans to place faith in Hamid Karzai, someone they’ve watched bungle, cheat, and lie for nine years.

It's extraordinary that Karzai has the chutzpah to demand that all U.S. aid be channeled through him. Can he account for any of the money we’ve given him so far?

It's extraordinary that Karzai would steal over a million votes in an election in which citizens risked their lives to cast ballots.

It's extraordinary that our administration appears to be telling the Brits they’re not giving it enough time when they let it be known that they’d like to pull out of Afghanistan by 2015, which would make it a 13-year commitment.

It's extraordinary that we still have troops in Iraq, Okinawa, and Germany. Is there ever a place we pull out of?

It's extraordinary that Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner call the shots on banking and economic policy. It's like hiring Jesse James to drive the train.

It's extraordinary that the Obama Administration still places its faith in WTO and NAFTA agreements that are nearly bereft of protections for workers and are beating us into the ground by importing junk and exporting jobs.

And remarkably, our tax code still subsidizes corporations that send U.S. jobs overseas.

It's extraordinary that conservative lawmakers believe they can gain votes and support by torturing unemployed people and withholding their benefits. Remarkably, in many congressional districts these lawmakers have gauged their constituents correctly.

It's extraordinary that no one in the media asks conservatives who demand that jobless benefits be offset by cuts elsewhere why they have no trouble voting for crazy boondoggles (Star Wars, for example, 19 years after the collapse of the USSR) and outright gifts to the super-wealthy (killing the estate tax, for example).

It's extraordinary that we must wait four more years for “pre-existing condition” to be wiped out of the insurance-industry vernacular.

JOBLESSNESS, FILIBUSTERS & RENT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

It’s unlikely any of those Republican senators who this week mounted a successful filibuster against jobless benefits thought about it, but they cut off funding just in time to make over a million families miss their mortgages, rent, and car payments for the month of July.

The senators then went home to enjoy another one of their two-week congressional holidays. Incidentally, you’d think someone would start to ask questions about how anyone gets away with taking off two weeks for Independence Day – a holiday whose one-day duration is stated right in its title. This is like quitting your work station for the weekend so you can go on a fifteen-minute coffee break.

It’s impossible to know how many families will go homeless because of the cavalier attitude of senators who make $174,000 a year plus almost unimaginable perks that include using proceeds from their legalized extortion rackets to “hire” family members at six-figure salaries. Just about every one of the fast-buck artists in the Senate who refused help to laid-off workers are the same legislators who killed a proposal to make big banks pay insurance fees against their own failure.

These are incredible back-to-back actions – working in behalf of the bankers who wrecked the world economy and then voting to withhold help from families impoverished by the bankers’ criminal incompetence. You’d think the constituents of some of these senators would catch on, but con men like Saxby Chambliss of Georgia take it for granted that they can get away with murder, and they do. All they have to do is lie about it. Sure, the mass media will also report what the liars’ adversaries say about an issue, but the two sides will be presented as though they’re both valid arguments even in instances when two minutes of Google research would expose the unassailable truth.

Besides which, millions of Americans get their news from Fox and other media that don’t even bother to report the true side of an argument.

Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, etc. claimed, for example, that we would all suffer terribly if we were to alter the worst health care system in the civilized world, and the media presented that side of the argument as an equally thoughtful viewpoint to counterbalance the force of reason.

Senators who cut estate taxes for the super-rich and fund Star Wars and all sorts of other corporate scams only notice the deficit when someone proposes a budget item that might actually do some good. But news stories don’t put two and two together.

As we celebrate a day that commemorates a revolution against tyranny, perhaps we can spend a moment or two thinking about all the Americans who this month will lose their battle to pay the rent.

My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

OBAMA FOLLOWS NIXON TRAIL INTO AFGHANISTAN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

All the bad news out of the Gulf of Mexico is masking another series of awful facts developing on the ground in Afghanistan that could put Rush Limbaugh and Co. over the top, making Barack Obama a one-term president.

Obama’s frightfully imbecilic Afghanistan policy is slowly fashioning him into a 21^st century Richard Nixon. Both men inherited wars from their predecessors that they could have extricated themselves from at the outset of their terms, but neither had the guts. In our topsy-turvy politics it’s easier to ride a mindless war policy downhill toward disaster than it is to slam on the brakes.

Nixon, like Obama, tried escalation for awhile, turning the Air Force loose on Cambodia and bombing the hell out of a jungle filled with innocents in hopes that some of the ordnance would strike the enemy and disrupt his supply lines. Obama has upped his ante from approximately 35,000 troops to almost three times that amount plus lots and lots of extremely expensive private contractors doing jobs that used to be done by people in uniform. And casualties are climbing, with the U.S. death rate now approaching two lives a day.

Eventually Nixon, crippled by Watergate, began to disengage from his war under the cloak of “Vietnamization.” Still, we lost approximately 20,000 U.S. lives during his turn at the wheel. All for nothing.

The Nixonites used to put out the same kind of blather we’re hearing from Obama and Company. Really meaningless crap. If we’re to believe this Administration, the corrupt, blundering Hamid Karzai, a disturbed personality and a hopeless liar, will lead the Afghan people toward democracy. It’s just possible Americans will accept that incredible whopper for awhile, but tell it to the Afghans, who’ve watched this guy up close for eight years already.

We watched Bush for eight years. How many people at the end of his second term would believe he could suddenly turn into a fine leader making wise decisions at every turn? See what I mean? It’s all ridiculous insulting propaganda, junk food for foolish or preoccupied minds. Only one out of ten Afghan police recruits can read. Yet we’re supposed to spend billions and billions turning it into a Central Asian Nebraska? Don’t hold your breath.

Our poor troops on the ground are supposed to convince the Afghans that we’re going to stay. They’re not dumb enough to believe that either. Because at some point we will leave, and when we do, whether it’s tomorrow or ten thousand U.S. lives from now, the result will be the same.

It would be nice to civilize Afghanistan and bring it peace and democracy. But even if those goals were possible, the price would be much too high. The time to win there was right after Nine-Eleven, when we had Bin Laden trapped. But most intelligence people believe he’s been across the border in Pakistan for years. If we pursue wars wherever Al Qaeda establishes a safe house for a while we’d now be at war with the United Kingdom and Germany, among other countries.

Where do you think those 100,000 troops would do us more good? Fighting a stupid fight in Afghanistan or cleaning up the Gulf State beaches? I rest my case.

My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

TRADE OLBERMANNN TO MEXICO

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Brave journalists in Mexico and Russia are getting murdered for trying to print real news. But here in the U.S., journalists safe from such atrocities write about who's going to win American Idol and speculate on why Al and Tipper broke up.
Or they behave like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, the supposedly liberal antidote to right-wing Fox.

Olbermann is a clumsy, would-be clown who mimics Fox and other far-right personalities in a silly voice that has about as much entertainment value as taking out the garbage. Then there’s his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow who’s supposed to be a cut above the rest because she reads the news with a smirk.

These and other media gatekeepers are searching frantically for something to take the place of the BP-sponsored disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which is depressing and devoid of sex appeal. They might consider checking out why we're stuck in two wars and being barbecued by huge global banks, oil and drug corporations, and anyone else who knows how to channel legal bribes to political weasels.

This dereliction of duty by the media adds to American confusion on what constitutes news and what constitutes gossip and helps explain why Tiger Woods had to apologize to everybody for screwing waitresses but no one has to explain why they pursue crazy wars or, like Obama’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers, slither back and forth between government and Wall Street leaving a slime trail of betrayal.

The giant banking corporations have siphoned off so much of the economy under our klept-o-cratic government that their share now threatens to exceed Limbaugh’s weight. The top four banks have assets equal to 52 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. They didn’t siphon off all this wealth by natural selection or free enterprise. They paid off people in government to put the fix in, fashioning legislation that made it inevitable. These banks need to be taken apart, the same way we took apart AT&T almost thirty years ago.

The AT&T suit was initiated by the Justice Department in 1974 under a Republican administration. In those days Republican leaders were conservative, not crazy.

But the financial reform bills moving around committees in the Senate and House won’t break up the big banks or even re-establish a separation between broker-financiers and plain-vanilla banks that served us well from the FDR years until “moderate” Bill Clinton gave Wall Street free rein in 1999 when he killed the Glass-Steagall Law. His Treasury Secretary (Guess who?) Lawrence Summers was fanatically in favor of the crazy decision to fix a banking system that wasn’t broken.

In his new position Summers is still “fixing” things. And he’ll get away with it too because the global corporations that own U.S. news media spend their resources on clowns like Olbermann and Maddow instead of crusading Mexican journalists like Valentín Valdés, a crime reporter for Zócalo de Saltillo. He was grabbed off the street January 8, thrown into an SUV, tortured, and shot to death. Valdés was 29 years old.

Olbermann gets $7 million a year plus perks. Valdés did a lot more for a lot less.
My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

THERE'S A DECENT WAY TO CONTROL IMMIGRATION

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

During his visit to Washington, Mexican President Felipe Calderon used coded language to assert once again that the best U.S. immigration policy along our southern border is not to have any. That’s been Mexico’s unofficial policy for decades, and all major political parties there support it.

The U.S. is a terrific safety valve for Mexico’s unemployed, and the dollars its displaced laborers send home keeps the place going. Adherents on both sides of the border, Calderon among them, figure anyone who’s managed to get inside the U.S.A. one way or another ought to be allowed to stay, especially if they stop looking for scarce jobs in Mexico and send money.

In my last post, when I juxtaposed Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg laws with the new Arizona law designed to catch and deport aliens, many readers seemed to think I sided with Calderon. I don’t. A country needs to control its borders. Otherwise, why be a country? We’d be attracting not just people looking for legitimate opportunities and freedom but also a wide range of felons and terrorists.

But stopping people and asking them for their papers because they look somehow foreign is a grievous practice that doesn’t reflect what our country is supposed to stand for. The solution to this quandary is in your wallet in the form of your high-tech ATM card. We need Social Security cards that, like ATM cards, can’t be forged and can be plugged into a central data bank. Anyone who employs people who don’t have the card should suffer serious penalties.

Under this logical system many people here illegally would go home and far fewer people would try to sneak in. But this very obvious solution is opposed by civil liberties advocates on the left and right because they fear it would infringe on our civil rights. They’re allied with greedhead corporations that don’t want to pay people what they’re worth.

We all know the current system. Would-be employees produce fake or borrowed Social Security cards printed with nineteenth century technology. They can be produced with a few clicks of a mouse. The corporations wink at these silly cards, record the bogus numbers for the IRS, and eventually, if the worker doesn’t skip to another job, the feds may catch the discrepancy, but then the employer can plead he did exactly what he was supposed to, so don’t blame him. Meanwhile the worker has moved on to another job site with the same bogus card or perhaps another one, starting the process all over again.

The meat-packing industry, for example, pays its lobbyists to keep the system in place so it can continue to hire eminently exploitable undocumented aliens to do dirty jobs for half their economic worth. Working on offshore oil rigs and mining coal that’s deep underground are dirty, dangerous jobs. Americans fill them because those industries pay what the jobs are worth.

If all industries did this it would raise the price of some goods – lettuce, for example -- but it would also create good-paying jobs for people who need them and we wouldn’t be saddled with a system that makes no sense.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) have a bill in the hopper that would create what they call a “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card” that would be required for all employees in the United States. But their bill specifically prohibits the information from being plugged into a national data bank, making it pretty much unworkable. The fact is, we need to know that people working in this country have a legal right to do so, and if people like Calderon don’t like it, they can earn the right to influence our domestic policies by applying for U.S. citizenship.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is now available online and in stores.

ARIZONA CAN FIND GUIDANCE IN NUREMBERG

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Now that Arizona cops will be stopping people with brown skin and asking to see their papers, there’s consternation among state authorities who must follow the will of the voters. Just how will they fulfill these grave new responsibilities in their brave new white world?

Well, there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. All they have to do is study how similar governments in the past executed their own citizen-defining policies. For this, there’s no better standard than the German Reich of 1933-45, which also had to identify and deal with a portion of the population whose position was no longer tenable.

There are differences, of course. The Arizona law makes the very existence of some people illegal. In Germany being Jewish wasn’t illegal, just penalized. But there are enough similarities between Nazi Germany and 21st century Arizona to learn from past mistakes and successes.

Also of use to Arizona will be the Nuremberg Laws that defined who could hold certain jobs or study at certain schools and all manner of other matters that will soon come up.

In order to exact the penalties required by law, the German government found it useful to require all Jews to wear yellow stars. This necessitated sending the Gestapo and other thugs out into the neighborhoods asking questions so that all those who ought to be wearing yellow stars were properly identified first. It worked fine. There were always neighbors around happy to cooperate with the process. Clearly there are plenty of civic-minded Arizonans willing to provide similar services to police.

Jews that wore stars could be rounded up because they wore stars. Jews that didn’t wear stars could be rounded up for not wearing stars. After arriving in the camps they received tattoos on their arms to help guards ascertain just who was who.

At first the Reich thought it might be a little touchy if they were to round up Jewish World War I veterans along with the other Jews, so they were given a pass. But eventually the population got used to Jews being rounded up and no longer made such distinctions, so the government, unimpeded, rounded up veterans too. Anne Frank's father Otto Frank was one of these veterans. Similarly in Arizona when the cops stop brown veterans and ask them for their papers it might weigh on the consciences of some white Arizonans, but like the good Germans, they'll get used to it in time.

Yellow stars and tattoos would be particularly useful in Arizona when it comes time to break up those families in which some brown people are citizens and some aren’t. When the state sends people back over the border, if they’ve received the appropriate tattoos it will make the identifying process oh so much easier should any of them try to return.

I hope I’ve eased the minds of Arizonans who feared they may have to solve all these questions on their own.

Exit Blue, a political satire by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010), is now available. See http://blackheron.mav.net/Exit%20Blue.html for more information.

FORECAST CLOUDY FOR TEA-PARTIERS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The political forecast is cloudy with a chance of sanity.

Yes, Sarah Palin gathers big crowds and extracts millions of dollars from her tea-party zombies. At the same time an Associated Press poll released this week found that one-third of those surveyed consider themselves tea-party supporters. A New York Times poll released simultaneously said 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as tea-party supporters.

The difference between 18 and 33 percent is huge, statistically speaking. One or both polls must be way off. But the discrepancy is also understandable. Just look at the placards these people produce. Many crowd members are functional crazies, and their answers to questions are liable to change minute to minute. What remains constant is their unreliability and susceptibility to nutty ideas that have little or no factual foundation.

A Massachusetts tea-party chieftain, complaining about high taxes, was recently confronted with the reality that Obama has cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. How did she react? She said she doesn’t believe it. You can’t change the minds of these people with mere facts. They’re governed by the fear and loathing the late, great Hunter Thompson found in so many corners of our nation.

It’s a little scary to know loonies walk among us and register to vote. They also get elected to Congress. But here’s another statistic worth noting: Demographers say that 2010 will be the tipping point – the first year in which more non-white babies are born in the U.S. than white ones. Just how many non-white faces did you spot at those tea-party rallies? Exactly. A party and a movement that excludes so many Americans is doomed to fail.

Each succeeding generation is less bigoted than the one before. The world is closing in on these jerks. They know it, they feel it, and it makes them crazier.

Now the bad news: The public is poorly educated, and increasingly, so are teachers and journalists. The public is fed more and more news that runs the gamut from sloppy and puerile to downright false. As resources grow scarce, so does good schooling, and the ignorance builds on itself, making the public easier to fool. Goofy slogans crush thoughtful positions.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck don’t have three semesters of college between them, and they’re not voracious readers either. They appear to secure their facts through bouts of mysticism that, at least in Limbaugh’s case, are heavily fueled by drug use. They don’t seem to know or care that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their followers (that includes most of the Republicans in Congress) don’t care either.

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend as much money as they like on political ads is an ax hanging over the heads of politicians who might otherwise be tempted to do good work. Cross Exxon-Mobil or GlaxoSmithKline and they can come after you in the next election with millions of dollars. That threat alone will help these corporations get what they want at the expense of everyone else. I hope I’m wrong, but I expect, for example, air, water, food, and medicine to grow increasingly dangerous while Congress concentrates on decoy issues like gay marriage, which is really none of its business.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is available online and at better stores everywhere.

WHAT ABOUT GIVING SECESSION AOTHER CHANCE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Republicans and their govnoed legions, crazier than Cubs fans, are so distraught that health care will now become available to more Americans that some of them are pining for the good old days of the Confederacy.

Govnoed, by the way, is what members of the old Soviet intelligence apparatus used to call people dumb enough to believe their bullshit. It means, literally, shit eaters. Govnoed, many of them in the West, would battle against their own self-interest even though, unlike well-placed party officials and KGB/GRU agents, they received no special perks in exchange for their efforts. Kind of an apt word for tea-party-ers and other right-wing goofballs who act as shock troops for the corporate country-clubbers still running the GOP. How do you explain these crazies? As Voltaire pointed out approximately 250 years ago, it’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently worried over Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation urging citizens to spend the month recalling the state’s days as a member of the Confederate States of America, you know, back when certain kinds of people he was too polite to categorize more precisely knew their place. The Georgia State Senate recently passed a bill to dedicate April to remembering the Confederacy, and there are similar nostalgic murmurs sweeping across the old Confederacy like the aroma of mint juleps in springtime. It’s becoming apparent that a black president in the White House enacting any of his agenda at all is just too much to take for these folks. And this go-it-alone sentiment isn’t confined to the South. Ex-Gov. Palin’s hubby has been known to pine for Alaskan independence, for example.


Good liberal Collins says she’d worry less about a “national discussion” of Civil War history “as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea.” Wait. Let’s back up a minute. Why should we automatically assume secession by some of our wackier states is a bad thing? Bear in mind that barely populated places like Wyoming and Utah have two senators apiece. Check out the voting records and character of their senators sometime. Who needs 'em? If any of these backward regions and their shit-eating camp followers elect to leave the union in a fair election, then what, may I ask, are Collins’ grounds for resistance? Think how much sweeter our country would be if we no longer had to try to compromise with right-wing maniacs? We might have a government that actually cares about its citizens.

The Republicans’ answer for the broken global economy, the broken health care system, and virtually every domestic problem we face is to deregulate corporations, mutilate social programs, and trim taxes for the very rich. When it comes to foreign policy questions, their answer is to shoot first and figure the rest out later. Climate change? Easy to fix. Just pretend it’s not there. And think how much more coal we could mine if owners didn’t have to answer to those pointy-headed safety inspectors. Church versus state? No problemo. The church is the state, and visa versa. At least that’s the way they think it oughta be.

In my new novel Exit Blue (warning: shameless plug follows) the union breaks up in another way. A too-familiar Texas dynasty retakes the White House and promptly invades Denmark, calling it the central front in the war on terror. The Blue States, having had enough, secede. How does that work out? I won’t spoil it for you.

But the fact is, the Constitution we’re taught to revere veered off well to the right of true democracy when it established a system that now gives voters in Idaho approximately 90 times the clout in the Senate as voters in New York or California. So should we be surprised that the Senate made things even worse by making sure nothing important can get passed without approval by 60 senators? That same inequality is also reflected in the Electoral College, which is why George W. Bush was handed the keys to the White House even though Al Gore won approximately 540,000 more votes. A key drawback to allowing crazy states to secede is that it would leave their sane minorities at the mercy of the marjority lunatics.

Republicans have veered so far to the right in the last few decades that their long-time friends the British Tories are creating as much distance from them as they can in the looming UK election. That's because Tories are actual conservatives, whereas Republicans, having purged their party of moderates, are mostly reactionaries. They want to return to the pre-New Deal era, and some of them, as Ms.Collins points out, seem to be flirting with the pre-Emancipation Proclamation era.

Note that I don't claim Democratic politicians are pure. Many of them, for example, tickled to pick up contributions from Wall Street greedheads, are helping Republicans block banking reform even as we speak. But if corrupt blowhards like Saxby Chambliss and Orrin Hatch could go do their own thing somewhere else it might breathe some fresh air on our polluted landscape, literally and figuratively. Or at least, as Hemingway’s Jake told Lady Brett, isn’t it pretty to think so?

Political satire Exit Blue by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron; 2010) is available at virtual stores everywhere.

SATIRICAL NOVEL ENVISIONS TWO-STATE SOLUTION IN 2019 AMERICA (And One of Them Invades Denmark! )

Exit Blue, by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010)

Imagine a vice president who conducts business as he paces in front of a Citizen Kane-sized fireplace clutching a shotgun and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Now imagine a White House that plants a friendly male hooker in presidential press conferences. Which idea is more absurd? More factual?

Yes, those of us who were paying attention know that the White House-connected male hooker story is genuine. His name was Jeff Gannon, and he had no prior journalism experience, but he was mysteriously granted press credentials and allowed to range freely through W’s news conferences for years until he was finally, if you’ll excuse the expression, exposed. The president used to call on him by name and then field the absurdly friendly questions that always followed.

With stuff like that going on, it pretty much takes the wind out of satire’s sails. Because it’s next to impossible to invent fiction that’s any goofier than the reality. But I persevered, refusing to give up writing crazy stuff just because the world is crazy.

The image of the vice president pacing in front of the fireplace may or may not be based on reality, but it figures in my novel EXIT BLUE, a roman à clef that comes out from Black Heron Press at the end of this month.

The book is based on the premise that the Bush family retakes the White House and this time declares war on Denmark, which it fingers as the central front in the war on terror. The title is derived from the next shoe to drop – secession by the Blue states. That’s when the story really gets started. It’s all told by a handsome Air Force veteran now working as a ghost writer who gets very close to the president and her twin sister. I can’t tell you any more without ruining it for you. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

Bush Handlers are working on a restoration even as we speak, and I meant EXIT BLUE as a cautionary tale akin to Friday the Thirteenth Part III: Jason Returns. Thanks to a zany electorate and the alarming chasm that continues growing between Red and Blue America, anything is possible. If the most recent Bush Administration taught us anything, it’s that talent and ambition aren’t necessarily meted out to individuals in proportionate quantities.

I took this humorous look at our possible future because after you’ve been hit by a bus, if you’re still breathing, probably the best thing to do is laugh. And when the Supreme Court gave the nod to the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000, a bus ran us over and dragged us down a ragged road for eight long years. Election results, like lightning and wayward buses, are independent events. Just because you’ve been struck once doesn’t mean they can’t strike you again.

But I don’t let Democrats off the hook either. And as we watch the Obama Administration step gingerly through the wreckage of the previous two terms, many of us are learning once again that candidates can be a lot like those meal photos we see in fast-food ads. When they take office, that’s when we’re handed the real food.

EXIT BLUE is for everyone who watched the Bush-Cheney Administration as though it were a horror movie they couldn’t turn off. But I also hope to reach tea-baggers, Limbaugh fiends, and all the Fox News groupies, male and female. They need vehicles like this in order to keep hopping around purple angry. Besides, I empathize with them. Much of my research involved shouting back at TV news.

Exit Blue is available for pre-ordering at most bookseller sites. Amazon has a special pre-order rate of $16.29. Shipments begin at the end of March.
--- Ivan G. Goldman, Rancho Palos Verdes, California

SCRATCH SURFACE OF THESE 'U.S.' FIRMS & SEE WHAT YOU GET

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Some Democratic members of Congress have put together a bill to prevent foreign corporations from buying ads pertaining to domestic political issues. On the surface it looks like an intelligent response to the recent Supreme Court ruling by five Republican justices that proclaims corporations have the right to flood our political processes with all the political ads they want.

The attempt to water down the results of the ruling will run into tough sledding in a corporate-controlled Congress, but you also have to wonder if the lawmakers behind it are really so naïve as to believe, for example, that companies like Merck and Exxon-Mobil, which by their definition could still purchase issue ads, are U.S. corporations. Why? Because they have headquarters in New Jersey and Texas? Let's not get silly.

Merck sells its drugs for half-price in Canada and hands out legal bribes to members of Congress to make it illegal to re-import their products across the border. Does that sound like it’s run by a patriotic bunch of folks who have American interests at heart? Exxon-Mobil sets up phony scientific institutes to claim there’s no man-made global warming so its congressional lackeys can hide behind a curtain of lies as the planet (including its U.S. corner) bakes. It encouraged petroleum creatures Bush and Cheney to invade Iraq so it could grab the oil and sell it to Americans at the same world price it sets for anyone else with greenbacks to barter.

These aren’t American companies. They’re global corporations that care no more or less for us than they do for Bulgaria or Sri Lanka. We could arguably rank the good intentions of Merck and Exxon-Mobil higher than, say, the Chinese companies that seem to have a special fondness for poisoning the food, paint, drywall, and other commodities they ship to us. But firms that get our military kids killed and mutilated so they can make a few extra bucks are not on our side. Neither are firms that put the fix in so they can squeeze the U.S. government and its citizens with discriminatory pricing. Issue ads by these corporations will match their private agendas. There must be some real U.S. corporations somewhere, but it’s doubtful any of them are big enough to be listed among the Fortune 500.

We live in a country where payday loan shops charge their victims fifteen percent interest for a two-week loan. On an annual basis that comes out to 390 percent without figuring in the compounding, and most of their loans do get compounded week after week as the working poor fall deeper into the pit of usury. These heartless bastards can work right out in the open because they paid off our politicians to make sure there’s no law to stop them. They even put up billboards and neon signs to bring in more suckers. Does it really matter whether such companies are American or not? They couldn’t do more harm if they were owned by Al Qaeda.
My novel Exit Blue, a political satire, is set for release in March from Black Heron Press and can be ordered now at Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Powells.com, and elsewhere on the net.

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.)