so who's my pick for president?

i think i'm gonna write in andrew jackson.

why, you ask?  consider:

during his first term in office, he watched with increasing disgust as the second bank of the united states (the federal reserve of its day) and its member banks brazenly engaged in the sorta shenanigans in which bankers unfettered by morality and/or oversight have engaged since time immemorial.

when it came time to renew its charter, a rubber-stamp congress sent him a bill for his signature approving same, and he sent it back to 'em with a big, fat veto on it, along with a message which read, in part,

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. 

[E]very man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. 

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.

the bankers, panicked by the prospect of their gravy train disappearing round the bend, decided to create a little panic of their own, hoping the resulting financial chaos would be blamed on the president, and he would have no choice but to enlist their aid to fix the mess that they themselves had created.  in response to their "see?  we're too big to fail" extortion attempt, he brought 'em all together, looked 'em in the eye and, as the minutes of that meeting reflect, uttered the following words:

Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country.  

When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. 

You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.

now, that, ladies and gentlemen, is my idea of a president.

*     *     *     *     *

late last week, the obama justice department announced that, after an extensive investigation, it had concluded that there was insufficient evidence to justify pursuing criminal charges agains any executive of goldman sachs for fraud or other wrongdoing in the events leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 and beyond--this in spite of the fact that, even though said bank had clearly issued liar loans through its subsidiaries, packaged those loans and sold the resulting junk-level mortgage-backed securities to its institutional clients as AAA even as it was secretly and massively betting against them, and its CEO had demonstrably lied to congress about same.

the investigation, curiously, apparently didn't involve a grand jury, special prosecutor or, for that matter, any actual investigators.

and now, it looks like the MF global CEO (and top obama bundler) jon corzine will escape prosecution for raiding his customer accounts of over $1 billion when his idiotic all-in bet on eurobonds went south, thus robbing thousands of hapless and innocent farmers, ranchers and other everyday types of their life savings and working capital, much of which may never be recovered.  turns out it was just one of those things that happens sometimes, or so say investigators, who are now turning their guns on a low-level MF global sacrificial lambemployee who should've caught the "mistake".

a relieved mr. corzine is said to be busy with preparations to restore his good name which has been unjustly tarnished, and--wait for it--launch a new hedge fund.

*     *     *     *     *

lest any of you think that i've been bagging excessively on the obama administration lately, make no mistake--i have no illusions that a romney administration would behave any differently; after all, they're all dependent on the same money.

and unless and until that money is removed from the political arena, all we have to look forward to is more of the same--which is why mkf has pretty much opted out.  the rest of you bitches may be content to dumb down your expectations and support these craven, bought-and-paid-for motherfuckers, but i never will again.

paperboys

why?  because this is where my mind is right now.


"a paper route?", i asked incredulously.  "are you seriously telling me that you, a grown man of your accomplishments, are throwing papers?"

it was 1977 and ginger and i had driven down to austin for what we thought was gonna be a relaxing weekend with beau and her sister, gayla.  little did we know.

"yeah," he said.  "and, this weekend, so are you."

since the glory days of the fox's lair, beau had been through many ups and downs, but mostly downs.  here was the thing about him, though--whether he was scaling the heights or plumbing the depths, i never saw him lose his air of self-assurance; he was master of whatever situation in which he found himself, and he always landed on his feet.  but this time, i had my doubts.

"but you can't make money throwing papers," i protested.  "nobody makes money throwing papers--hell, i sure never did."

"that's because you were doing it wrong."

"oh yeah?  then enlighten me."  so he did.

turns out when beau returned from vietnam in the late 60's, broke and at loose ends, he found himself in florida.  he worked in construction for awhile, until, tired of breaking his back for little money, he started looking around for a better way.  it came when, after calling the miami herald for the umpteenth time to complain about his missing paper, the circulation manager apologized for the lousy service, told him finding reliable carriers for his crime-ridden area was a huge problem.  that's when the light went on.

beau talked the guy into giving him not one, not two, but ten routes--morning and afternoon--promised him he could solve all his problems.  he then went out and bought an old step-van, recruited a dozen 8-year-old urchins off the streets, offered each the princely sum of a dollar a day and all the candy they could eat.

each morning at three, he'd pile the kids into the back of the van, pick up the papers and drive while they rolled.  he'd drop 'em off one by one at their assigned corners with all their papers--their little shoulder-bags so full they could barely walk--go have breakfast, come back, pick 'em up, take 'em home, sleep til noon, and repeat the process at three that afternoon.  as more routes became available, the operation grew, and beau became not only the newspaper king, but the undisputed pied-piper/fagin of the hood.

"so lemme get this straight--they did all the work, and you paid 'em a dollar?"

"hey, those kids learned life lessons money can't buy."

"uh huh.  and you actually made a living doing this?"

he smiled that smile.  "where do you think the money for the fox's lair came from?"

*     *     *     *     *

unfortunately for beau, times had changed, and austin wasn't third-world miami--he'd have to do it without the child labor this time.  he figured it out, though.

he had long ago realized that the most time-consuming part of a paper route was not the throwing, but the rolling.  carriers would gather at the station, collect their papers and then spend an hour or two rolling and banding them, loading them into shopping carts, shlepping 'em out to their cars and filling 'em up.

fuck that--he figured if he just tossed the bundles into the car and rolled the papers while he drove and threw, he could do two routes instead of one in the same amount of time.

"your hands are pretty busy, so you drive with your knees," he explained.

he had managed to pick up two large, adjoining semi-rural routes in far-east austin--morning and afternoon--and breezed through each run in a little over two hours during the week, leaving the rest of his day free.  it was the weekends that were the problem, when all four routes overlapped and had to be thrown between the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 a.m.  it was a huge undertaking, and gayla got pressed into service on the weekends--and that particular weekend, so did ginger and i.

we stayed up that friday night, eating, drinking and playing board games, and headed out around 2:30 in two cars.  beau had hitched a little trailer to his car, which i didn't really understand until i saw the mountain of paper that awaited us.

"c'mon, this is everybody, right?  this can't all be yours."

he laughed.  "this is nothing--wait'll you see sunday."

*     *     *     *

by the time i moved down to austin the following year to begin my first half-hearted attempt at a UT education (back in the days when you could still work your way through college), beau had talked me into joining him in his enterprise.  since a morning route was outta the question for my sleep-til-noon ass, i opted for an afternoon route instead.  but first, i'd need training in the beau method--and i'd get a crash course.

i shadowed him on his route a few times, sitting in the backseat.  he never used rubber bands to roll, opting instead for the more-expensive bags usually reserved for rainy days, because he could hook a sleeve of 100 under his belt, hang it between his legs, fold the papers once and slip 'em into the bags as he drove.  thursdays, saturdays and sundays were a little more tricky, because on those days the papers came in two parts; rather than opening the main section of each paper and inserting the supplement like he was supposed to, he'd just slap 'em together, fold once and into the bag they'd go.  when the front seat was empty and the floorboards full, he'd reach into the back and pull another couple bundles forward and start all over--all this, understand, while driving at speed, turning corners, handling a clutch and five-speed (and usually a cigarette and cup of coffee), and keeping a running conversation going with me--oh, and throwing papers out the window when appropriate.  it was really kind of amazing to watch.

the route itself was byzantine--miles of unmarked dirt roads, ramshackle houses and trailers with no numbers, and, remembering how much trouble i had had memorizing the orderly suburban route i had had taken on in high school, i couldn't imagine how he had learned it with such seeming ease.

"lemme guess,"  he said.  "you had a route list on paper, and for the first three weeks you'd stop at every street, scan the sheet for addresses and drive at 5 miles an hour looking for numbers.  took you forever, right?"

"well, yeah, that's how you do it."

"well, yeah, if you're an idiot.  i got news for you--three days from now, i'm taking the day off.  you're gonna do my route, you're gonna do it by yourself and you're gonna do it perfectly, in about the same time it takes me."

and, you know what?  he was right.

the next day, he taped the whole route as we drove--"turn left, look left, start counting mailboxes, and throw your fourth one--it's yellow--and then look right, pass the big tree with the rusty buick under it and hit the second driveway", and on and on it went.

the following day, he put me in the driver's seat and watched from the back as the tape played and i fumbled with bags and papers, bumping over curbs and veering into opposing traffic as i turned corners with my knees while wildly throwing papers left and right--and it didn't help that he was laughing his ass off the entire time.  but, by god, i did it.

within a month, i was a veteran of the beau method of paper-throwing--handling my own route, throwing papers across three lanes of traffic with one hand with an accuracy nolan ryan would envy while rolling with the other, and making more money in two hours a day than most of my minimum-wage fellow students would earn in eight.

the best days were when we'd do our routes together--his rural route at one, my urban route at three. the papers were secondary by then--hell, that was automatic.  it was the hours we spent together surrounded by those piles of newsprint that i remember about that time.  it seemed like nothing then, but i'd give a lot for just one of those lost afternoons right about now.

i'm almost ready to campaign for romney just to spite these assholes

i used to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that the george w. bush administration was and would forever be the most inept and incompetent of my lifetime--until these clowns came along.

the fact that this "transcendent", "post-racial" president and the loutish, race- and class-baiting buffoon pictured above are even in the running for a second shot at offices for which they have proven eminently unqualified speaks far more to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the opposition party and the country at large than to anything they themselves might have accomplished.

and since they have nothing to run on in the way of accomplishments--hell, have in fact fucked up everything they've touched--they and their cronies have opted to descend to the sort of baseless smears against their opponents that make willie horton and swift-boating--you know, the sorta stuff that the left screamed about when it was turned on their guys--seem like child's play by comparison.

there are all sorts of reasons to oppose a romney presidency, but these guys can't fight on an honest, above-board level for fear of highlighting their own laughable record, so it's into the gutter instead--stir up the rabble, throw out libelous charges at random and incite race and class resentment

really, joe?  how many of the big donorsbanks has your justice department gone after?  how about zero?

in the desperate hope that something--anything--sticks, and to hell with the effect that such a campaign will have on the country they swore to preserve, protect and defend.

my advice to mitt:  fire your clueless advisors, take off the white gloves and go pull karl rove outta mothballs--and while you're at it, channel the ghost of lee atwater.  you're gonna need 'em both.