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I don’t want people to start thinking that this is a political blog site, because that’s the kiss of death. I see this as a comedy/literary blog site. If you don’t think my stuff is funny, maybe you’re not smoking the right stuff.
Nevertheless, with the election coming up and the Republican Party seemingly ready to go straight to the depths of hell, which is what they have worked so hard to accomplish and what they so richly deserve, I don’t want to pass up my last chance to kick their bloody and prostate body for one last time before I go back to other, vastly more entertaining diversions.
This election is going to tighten up considerably in the last days, regardless of what anybody believes. And, like the monster in “Alien,” the Republicans are not going to allow themselves to get pitched into a boiling vat of red-hot molten metal without one last venomous attempt to destroy humanity.
In this last week leading up to the balloting they are going to use every insult buried in the dark chambers of their black souls to try to scare voters away from voting Democratic, accusing the Democrats of cowardice, treason, being agents of Osama Bin Laden, stealing bread out of the deserving mouths of hereditary billionaires, advocating buggery and every other monstrous malediction their sleazebag strategists can conjure up.
They’re even insulting Democrat’s faces. Last week Hillary Clinton’s opponent for the senate, John Spencer, told a reporter that she was spending a fortune of money on plastic surgery. Now the politics of attacking people’s faces is infuriating enough, believe me! I have had that shit played on me personally. New Yorkers seem to think they can say anything to a person, and when you punch the shit out of them for doing it, they’re shocked, SHOCKED!
In most of the United States, if you tell a person, “I don’t like your face,” it means you’re ready to kill or be killed, but in New York, where people’s self-esteem is already so battered and degraded that they’re willing to accept almost any indignity or humiliation in order to live long enough to find a sucker even lower down on the food chain than they are to take it out on, it has all the impact of saying “Good morning,” or “Pass me the Cheerios.”
Unfortunately for these morons, I’m from Chicago, where you can really end up in a world of shit for cutting too close to the bone with a person. It’s cultural. If you fuck with me, I’m not going to look for somebody else to take it out on. I’m going to look for a way to go back to the source of the problem.
A lot of people don’t like me for this, and it has caused me a lot of headaches, but I don’t care. At least I can look at myself in the mirror and say, “There is something more than a scumsucking sleazebag.”
I got fucked out of a lot of money by my father’s family. Generally, it hasn’t bothered me too badly because I can take care of myself, but a few years ago, during one of the recessions, I was forced to take a job for a while which I really felt was beneath my dignity. My girlfriend, Magpie, and I accepted an invitation to spend the weekend in the country, and while we were there, our hostess, who has not been able to resist behaving insultingly toward me at various times, decided to twist the knife by telling me, “You know, your family didn’t do anything wrong by stealing your inheritance. These things happen all the time.”
Now, I wasn’t soliciting any advice. Normally, I would have told her to mind her own business and while she was at it, to go fuck herself as well, but I was a guest in her house and it was far from New York, so I just said, “I guess you’re right.” That shit totally broadsided me at the time and I wasn’t thinking. But I haven’t forgotten it. And I have gotten even over the years at my leisure, but people with abusive natures have thin skins, and they are not satisfying victims.
Similarly, Hillary Clinton, who has a much thicker hide than I do, has resisted the temptation to tell John Spencer, “Why don’t you extract your ugly head from your rectum long enough to go hang your pathetic self from a bridge?” She knows she’s far enough ahead of him in the polls that in a couple of weeks he’ll be chop suey. She has bigger fish to fry than getting into an insult war with the Republican mayor of fucking Yonkers. So, like she just lamely responded, “I used to be cute when I was a kid.”
OK, Hillary Clinton ain’t so cute anymore. Whose fault is that? With her money she could get the best personal trainer in the business, go to a spa and lift weights, get a nip/tuck job, fly to Paris for a new wardrobe.
I believe that if a person does not have enough sense to have a nice appearance, how can you trust him to do anything right? That’s why I love former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is a thief, an assassin and is guilty of just about every outrage to humanity that you care to enumerate. The guy looks like the star of a Pedro Almodovar movie, and at age 70 he’s no kid.
Berlusconi started life as the normal middle-class kid of a bank employee, worked as a lounge singer on cruise ships and, using his father’s banking connections, built a media and real estate empire that made him the richest man in Italy. This guy is what Trump wishes he was. He is the legitimate article. Unfortunately, unlike Trump, he was not born into a fortune so he has had to cut a lot of corners, and he is perpetually under indictment.
What of it? The Italian people don’t lean to condescending moralism, which is one of the features that endear them to me. Recently, The Financial Times, which hates Berlusconi with the moral fervor of the anglo-saxon conservative tribune that it is, ran a beautiful portrait shot of him, and the guy looked so fantastic and handsome that my heart was bursting with admiration for him. God Bless Him with his beautiful hair transplant, lean athletic body, $10,000 suits, castles in Sardinia, his mistresses and his football team. How I love the guy!
Hillary Clinton could be fantastic and glamorous like that. She has brains and culture. Unfortunately, Republican attacks on her over the years have sapped her self-esteem to the point where her fashion sense is on the negative side of the gauge. She wants so desperately to be accepted and elected that she intentionally degrades her appearance so as not to offend some idiot office manager in Rolla, Missouri into voting against her.
A long time ago one of my bosses, whom I refer to as Pops, impressed by my ability and determination, asked me, “Why haven’t you considered going into politics?”
I told him, “Pops, with my record I couldn’t get elected dog catcher,” and in the hypocritical, moralistic climate of the country, no truer words were ever spoken. But I also told him, “I don’t have the stomach for retail politics. I don’t want to have to shake hands with strangers and I don’t want people coming to me with their problems.”
See, politics is not just about stealing and flying to Scotland (Gawd, Scotland, yet!) for golf trips. You’re expected to be a fucking people person.
Fortunately, I have always had enough highly developed job skills that I have been able to keep being employed without having to depend upon the good will of the world at large.
The positive side of a thing like that is that I can look any man in the eye, though I truly detest making eye contact with New Yorkers, who are a bunch of lying scumbags. New Yorkers just lie to keep in practice.
I can also say that whatever I have stolen, it has been at the low end of the scale. No less an authority that my old boss, Pops, who was no slouch at stealing, believe me, told me with great sincerity, “You’re as honest a man as anyone I know,” which essentially meant that he felt reasonably secure that I wasn’t stealing from him. Remember, we’re talking about the fashion business at this time, when thievery was as much a part of human existence as eating and breathing. Just to give you an example, our trucking contractor, our garbage pick-up and the labor union representing our factory help were all Gambino fronts. When Tommy Gambino came into our place for a look around, Pops and all the old-timers treated it like a diplomatic visit from the Queen of England. After he left, they all gushed, “Did you notice how wonderful and polite he was? Just like a regular person!”
Compared to these barnacle-encrusted throwbacks, I was a clean guy. Pops appointed me to check the workers’ parcels and handbags when they left the place at noon and at night, and I caught quite a lot of thieves, at no small risk to my own person, because Latin people don’t feature being shown up for thieves. Meantime, while I was enforcing vigilance at the door, the Company’s executives were looting the place with both hands in the executive suite. So typical!
Stealing in New York is full-time and relentless. Nobody can live on what he makes. My father’s family stole from me, figuring I would make it up by robbing somebody else. My girlfriend, Magpie, still pines for her German boyfriend, Vautour, who built up a ponzi scheme by robbing immigrant janitors out of their life savings, which he squandered on speedboats and houses in the Hamptons. First he got rid of her, then the feds got rid of him. But she still doesn’t mind reminding me that I stink (sorry, I don’t swindle people with bogus investment schemes and go to federal prison. I’d rather work for a living).
In “Les Misérables” Jean Valjean did 20 years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread, and was subsequently hounded by Inspector Javert for decades after. This may have been written as a fiction by Victor Hugo, but he didn’t just make it up. He either knew a real story like that or had an anecdotal source for it. So the Koslowskis, Skillings and Ebbers shouldn’t feel so bad. They got a comparable sentence for stealing hundreds of millions and billions. Nevertheless, some really big whales escaped the net.
Which begs the question: how much is enough? Does a thief ever stop and say, I have all I need? If Jean Valjean had not been apprehended with the loaf of bread, would he have been back the next day to steal a horse?
That was the guiding principle behind Mayor Giuliani’s crime program: get them while they are stealing small, before they start stealing big. And he was universally applauded. But even as crime dried up at the street level, it was roaring full speed on Wall Street, with nobody the wiser. And those in the know weren’t talking.
Not that the mayor of New York is responsible for going after securities fraud, but the same people who applauded Giulaini’s safe streets initiative pounced on Eliot Spitzer for being a dangerous radical and a threat to capitalism.
Anyway, Spitzer is now moving up to the governor’s mansion. In his place, Andrew Cuomo, and it remains to be seen how much talent he will bring to the job.
The first issue they will have to deal with is the State Comptroller General Alan Hevesi, who detailed a state employee to chauffer his wife for years while he was the state’s top auditor. Maybe he figured nobody was going to audit him. Nevertheless, Hevesi is also a slam-dunk for re-election, and his first official act will probably be to resign and let Spitzer choose his replacement.
But does stealing ever reach a saturation point, like pushing yourself away from the Thanksgiving table, or does your appetite expand with the supply, like an over inflated Macy’s Parade balloon? That would seem to be the case. Italy wasn’t big enough to satisfy Silvio Berlusconi, who is now also under indictment in Spain for the same activities he pursued in his own country. Publishing magnate Conrad Black’s avarice led him to gorge himself in three countries.
The parable of my old boss, Pops, is a telling fable. The guy spent his whole life chiseling and stealing until he had enough to keep his whole family in the chips down to the tenth generation. Most of it he gave to his sons while he was alive so that it wouldn’t end up in probate. A little bit he kept for himself to live in retirement with his longtime girlfriend, Bonnie.
One day he fell ill and his sons convinced him to sign over a power of attorney for the little bit that he kept for himself. When he got better, Pops asked his sons to get rid of the power of attorney and restore his money to him. They refused, and put him on a shoestring budget (he never spent any money anyway). When he died, Pops’ sons evicted his girlfriend from his condo and cut her off without a dime.
So I think we can infer that stealing is an open-ended activity, and that it is hereditary. But if Pops’ family was rife with larceny, what to say about Sanford Weill, the Citicorp chairman who was to Pops what the Intrepid is to a leaky rowboat?
Nobody suffered more at the hands of Eliot Spitzer, at least financially, than Sanford Weill, whose company Spitzer nailed for every tacky off the books transaction imaginable. If people can resist anything but temptation, Citicorp’s bankers, analysts and creative accountants displayed their wares like two dollar crack whores and figuratively broke down Enron’s doors with irresistibly delicious structured finance deals and bond offerings that Skilling, Lay et al couldn’t resist until Enron was finally bled dry, while the bankers were simultaneous hawking their “financial products” to WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. After all, if you have a product, why not market it everywhere?
It was a perpetual motion merry-go-round of greed and stealing unequaled in human history, and Sanford Weill presided over it like a king in front of a particularly delectable Viennese pastry until Spitzer showed up like an unpleasant waiter and presented him with the bill.
But Spitzer didn’t just stop with Sanford Weill. He’s now going on to Weill’s daughter, Jessica Bibliowicz, who seems to have her own pact with the devil. Not content to just be the spoiled daughter of a super-loaded multi-billionaire, Jessica-baby has set out to show the world that she can make her own money. Unfortunately her skill set is rather limited, and the best she was able to do was to set herself up as – get this - a life settlement broker, who lines up sick, old people who are willing to sell their life insurance policies to unscrupulous companies for ten cents on the dollar because they are in desperate straits and need cash now.
These sleazy operations, which, incidentally, are founded by some very large so-called “reputable” corporations, get the old people to name them as beneficiaries for their life insurance, pay them a few bucks, and then continue paying the premiums on the policies until the old geezers kick off, and then they collect the inheritance.
It’s a sickening racket, and to make matters worse Spitzer is charging Bibliowicz, who was nominally supposed to represent the interests of the policy holders, with accepting kickbacks from the purchasing companies for keeping the sale price low.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, but that’s all they’re willing to pay.”
Now what is the heiress of a multi-billionaire doing chiseling sick people in wheelchairs and walkers out of their life insurance? She’s conforming to the law of the jungle. And that’s what we’re living in – a jungle. No wonder the Frenchmen don’t want any part of it!
The system, as it is presently structured is configured to make bottom feeders out of all of us, even those at the top. That’s why I’m throwing my support to Spitzer. He at least seems to want to raise us above the level of scavengers and vultures. So does Hillary Clinton, who is first and foremost an idealist and philosophy student, regardless of all the low digs John Spencer has to say about her face.
God Bless America and God Bless Hillary Clinton. May she sweep into the White House with her shabby wardrobe and clean up the vile mess left behind by the Republicans.
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Posted on 11/1/2006
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