December 25, 2008
Sarko/Bruni in Brazil Unfortunately, the United States has suffered from very adverse publicity in recent years. I am not here to beat a dead horse about the perversely destructive nature of the last administration’s moribund social and political culture that erupted in one last murderous frenzy, like the final scene in an “Alien” movie. I only want to point out what every businessman knows: adverse publicity can kill a commercial enterprise.Our commercial rivals have been quick to capitalize on our missteps. Notably, the French, whom we instinctively recognize as being the greatest threat to us in terms of commercial dominance. A medium-size power of only sixty million persons, the French, endowed with a heritage of centralized planning dating back to Louis XIV and updated by Charles de Gaulle, have been astute in mobilizing their country’s resources by consolidating their agricultural, industrial and economic sectors and applying a coordinated strategic mobilization with the goal of asserting French authority in the scientific and commercial realms.The election of Nicholas Sarkozy to the French presidency last year immeasurably enhanced their commercial prospects. Even though his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal was indisputably charming and qualified, she could never have brought to the Elysée Palace the qualities of focus and dynamism that Sarkozy has brought to bear in promoting French interests.Sarkozy, with all his female troubles dating from his frenetic attempts to retain his wife, Cécilia, whom he chased to New York and retrieved from her lover like a comic cuckold out of a Molière stage comedy, to the palace intrigues stemming from a rivalry between glamorous female cabinet ministers, reminiscent of the ancien regime, to his choice of pop singer, fashion model and notoriously active groupie Carla Bruni as first lady of France, resembles nothing so much as the frenetic motor-mouth Energizer Bunny of the Duracell commercials.The first year of Sarkozy’s presidency has to this point been immeasurably successful. He flew to Libya and succeeded in liberating some doctors and nurses who were under sentence of death ostensibly for infecting a children’s hospital word with AIDS, and while he was there took the time to seal a nuclear power program worth billions of euros; negotiated an end to the war in Georgia; triumphantly succeeded in his role, to the unanimous praise of all the member nations, in his role in the rotating presidency of the European Union, notably over Irish objections to the establishment of an EU constitution; and is currently on a state visit to Brazil, where his first official act was to sign a commercial contract to sell that country a military program of 4 submarines and 50 transport helicopters worth six billion euros, with a memorandum of understanding to sell them a nuclear submarine and a squadron of Dassault fighter jets, all to be constructed in Brazil under a transfer of technology agreement.An essential component of this trade strategy has been the official French strategy, first conceived by De Gaulle’s minister of culture, Andre Malraux, to use France’s cultural patrimony as a way to pave the way for the country’s commercial interests. The government has been astute in using fashion, art, cinema, music, sport and literature to create a welcoming environment for its manufacturing, agricultural and commercial interests in a way that no other nation has been able to succeed.The current Brazil contract has been negotiated in a context of several years’ cultural exchanges culminating in the present Year of France in Brazil, which includes, notably, a festival of French opera in the historic Manaus opera house in that Amazon city.Surprisingly, or even shockingly, Sarkozy’s choice of a consort, in Carla Bruni, has been a pivotal component in enhancing his country’s glamorous image. Not that his choice of her has been met by universal acclaim. As one French blogger wrote, “Does the president have the right to marry a woman whose butt has been seen by the whole world, and whom everybody knows the name of everybody who has had it?” This guy had a good point, but her universal exposure notwithstanding, Carla Bruni is a popular and celebrated first lady, dominating the social pages the way her husband has totally monopolized the headlines.In addition to her innumerable photo coverage and interviews, Bruni, an accomplished composer and singer, has released a number one CD of original songs. This week on the Internet there is a video of her playing and singing a duet with French rock icon Johnny Hallyday. She is the focal point of Sarkozy’s state visit to Brazil, where she is scheduled to celebrate New Year’s in the country’s night clubs and meet with her biological father, who is a resident of that country. The entanglements of Carla Bruni’s personal affairs, her various parents and foster parents and various children and their various fathers, have the French public mesmerized in a way that makes “Desperate Housewives” pale by comparison.So why did the United States, with all our superb submarine and helicopter technology, not get a piece of this Brazil action? As I first pointed out, the U.S. is a victim of monstrous public relations engendered by a clique that assumed power in what amounts to a coup d’état and then proceeded to practically destroy us internally and externally. Fortunately, we now have a chance to recover, but from a promotional point of view we need some innovative thinking to regain market share.Nicholas Sarkozy may or may not be brilliant, but he has seized the opportunity to profit from our mistakes, and Carla Bruni is one of his tools. The incoming U.S. administration may lack the élan of the French presidency, and cultural factors ensure that there will never be an American equivalent of Bruni in the White House (boy, is that an understatement!), but Barack Obama, who resembles 99% of the emerging world in complexion, could be a potent form of public relations. If he puts on a sombrero, Mexican public opinion of us will change overnight, and so on down the line.But one guy, even if he is the president, cannot alter our present crashing trajectory. That is going to require a concerted strategy of promoting American cultural assets in tandem with our commercial expertise to recover our position of dominance. The first thing is to respect our own culture as something other than a by-product of marketing and present it as an organic entity in its own right, giving it the respect that we ourselves have long denied it. We then need to consecrate the resources to impose our own culture on other countries (when I say impose, I mean it in the French sense of the word, where it gains authority on the basis of merit). Then our cultural and marketing arms have to work together to present a coherent program to the rest of the world.Fortunately or unfortunately, the current total breakdown of our system presents a window of opportunity to innovate, depending upon the quality of the talent we are able to bring to bear on the situation. In my mind it would require not just a redressment of manufacturing and mobilization of cultural resources, but an administrative coordination in the seat of government involving not only the Departments of State and Commerce (a particularly knotty problem, considering that the incoming Secretaries of State and Commerce are not likely to want to get along due to past political considerations), but also the establishment of a new cabinet post, the Department of Culture, to coordinate and maximize the impact of our cultural resources. The French have done a maximal job with their Ministry of Culture, and now we have, with the so-called free market guys out of the way, an opportunity to emulate their success.When I say culture, that includes not just Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, but sport, like the NBA, NASCAR, jazz, ballet etc. All forms of American expression. As the French have proven, taking culture and commerce to their ultimate expression represents at the ultimate point a convergence to the vanishing point.Throw out the previous scorn for central planning. Coordination of resources has been a successful technique in times of war and national emergency, and the current breakdown represents as much of a crisis as any time in history.
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Posted on 12/25/2008
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December 16, 2008
A lot of Republican operatives had to have been holding their breath on the morning when agents of the FBI went to the house of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to arrest him on corruption charges. One misstep or the refusal of Blagojevich to go along with the charade, and the whole Republican game plan would have disastrously unraveled.Even in the event that the charges were serious, which I don’t believe for a minute, Blagojevich, as the sitting governor of a major industrial state, posed virtually no flight risk. The U.S. Attorney could just as well have called Blogojevich at his office and instructed him to come down to the federal court building to be arraigned. The idea, of course, was to catch him off his guard and before he could get use of his senses. If Blagojevich would have had his wits about him he could have called upon his Illinois State Police security detail, refused to accompany the FBI, gone to the courthouse under his own steam and had an opportunity to deny all charges to the press. He could have called the whole procedure a joke and a Republican power play, entering the court through the front door wearing an expensive suit and accompanied by a battery of attorneys instead of being dragged through the system like a Roman slave in shackles, no better than a common purse snatcher.The Republicans may be reduced politically and philosophically, but their capacity for creating chaos and manipulating the media to wreck the Democratic agenda remains undiminished. Obama has not even been sworn in yet and they already have him on the run. One can already see them sharpening their knives and forks to feast on him, secure in the fact that the Clintons, of whom they are deathly afraid, will never lift a finger to save him. Far from it.People ask, how is it Blagojevich shot his mouth off knowing he was under investigation and surveillance by the Justice Department? The answer is two-fold: first, as a Chicago Democrat he has nothing but contempt for the Republican Party and the bogus Bush administration. Second, like retired suburban Chicago police sergeant Scott Peterson, who is under investigation for murdering two of his ex-wives and who still can’t keep quiet, Blagojevich is a loudmouth idiot who cant’s keep his mouth shut under any circumstances. It goes with the territory. Chicagoans are imbeciles. That’s how Obama rose so far so fast; he was the only guy in Chicago with any brains at all.The reader would certainly be justified in asking, how can this writer qualify a city of three million inhabitants and one of the richest in the world as a bunch of nitwits? Very simple, I was born and grew up there, and the first thing I came to understand as a teenager was that an extravagant display of intelligence never got anybody anywhere unless it was directed into making money, then it was OK. The perfect guy to get girls was a knucklehead with a new GTO. It’s like a smaller version of New York, minus Manhattan (even in Manhattan you can sometimes go too far with being smart).When Obama ran away from Blogojevich, he showed he could be railroaded by the manipulation of public opinion. He hadn’t formulated a strategy. This is a lesson the Republicans won’t forget. He couldn’t have handled it worse. When he called for Blagojevich to resign, Obama sunk to the level of an air-head television reporter. He fell into the Republican trap of: what contacts did he have with Blagojevich and when did he have them, when in fact negotiating with the state’s governor over an suitable replacement for his senate seat was a totally appropriate activity.You better believe that the other world leaders are watching to see what kind of personal resources of intelligence and firmness Obama will have at his disposal. If they deduce that he is easily confused and intimidated, they will act accordingly to use that to their advantage. Vladimir Putin, who is himself a black belt, an ex-intelligence officer and an expert chess player will definitely examine Obams’s psychological profile to see where he can derive an advantage. Putin comes from a very tough line of leaders from Peter the Great to Stalin, and he won’t hesitate to combine sophistication with brutality to achieve his ends. Fortunately for the US, the collapse in commodity prices should slow him down considerably going forward. Nevertheless, if Obama comes across as a lightweight, Putin and the other gang of thugs on the world scene will use whatever means at hand to get the edge on him, and the qualities that helped him to emerge in the bush league world of Chicago municipal politics may not be sufficient to sustain him in the majors.It may develop that Obama-Biden is just a brief detour from the inevitable path of historical determinism leading to a Clinton dynasty.
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Posted on 12/16/2008
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December 13, 2008
As W.C. Fields once said, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Now that the authorities have made the streets safe, using computer projections and pins in maps to deploy police, they should start to station cops in board rooms to arrest lawyers and accountants.Gone are the days of 3-card Monty idiots shuffling nut shells on a milk crate. All the gangsters have moved indoors to target a much more lucrative class of marks.Somebody ought to build a statue to this Bernard Madoff for bringing down an absolutely repugnant class of people, who defined themselves into social classes determined by gradations of wealth. Ugh!It was a cult of money, with Madoff as the priest of greed. How do you define somebody who invests his whole family fortune with a guy who tells him, “Don’t ever ask me what I’m doing with your money, because I won’t tell you.” I wouldn’t trust a guy like that with five bucks.There have been great scam artists throughout history. Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king, came to the aid of European governments in exchange for the monopoly on manufacturing matches in their countries, then he sold debt securities based on the income from the loans and from the match production. Ultimately he sold too many bonds, and when the Depression hit he had to turn it into a Ponzi scheme. When the law closed in on him he blew his brains out in his Paris mansion.Another fantastic crook was Serge Stavisky in France who bribed bankers to issue letters of credit based on imaginary assets of gold and jewels locked in safety deposit boxes in their banks. Nobody could check if the collateral was really there because it was locked in safety deposit boxes, get it? Stavisky bribed judges and government ministers to keep the cops and prosecutors off him, but it couldn’t last forever and eventually his erstwhile friends decided that they would sleep a whole lot better if he were eliminated from the scene. Stavisky was found with a bullet in his head in a chalet in the French Alps, while an honest magistrate who had been doggedly pursuing him was also found dead a few miles away. The resulting furor caused the collapse of the French government and rioting in the streets.Stavisky had style. His story was made into a movie in which he was played by Jean-Paul Belmondo with Catherine Deneuve for his mistress. If they decided to make a movie about what’s going on here in New York, it would have to resemble “It’s A Mad Mad Mad World” with a cast of thousands of idiots. You don’t have enough funny comedians to fill all the roles.It’s like “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” times a hundred. Calling Madoff the biggest thief in history is letting all those other jokers off the hook. What about AIG and the $140 billion that vanished there? Or the $750 billion investment bank bailout? The current thievery goes back to Ken Lay and Enron. People are so fickle. They only care about the latest thief.We need a freakin Pantheon of Thievery, like a Caesar’s Palace with marble statues, a special hall for embezzlers like Conrad Black, insurance fraud for AIG, securities fraud, hedge fund fraud. These guys are like gods of crime and they deserve their own temples with statues and virgins burning incense.The times we are living in today require new mega-jails for the millions of attorneys, accountants, brokers, auditors and crooked regulators who need to be locked up. Maybe that old movie “Escape From New York” was right after all. Just throw up a fence around the place.
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December 12, 2008
As the old saw goes, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” Today Bernard Madoff's Madoff Investment Securities, a $50 billion investment firm catering to institutional investors and very rich (not any more) people was exposed as a huge ponzi scheme, and its founder arrested.Fifty billion up in smoke… The New York Post calls it the biggest fraud scheme ever. I suppose they’re differentiating it from the banks collapsing, or AIG defaulting on $140 billion, which they don’t regard as fraud but just witless stupidity.We are being propelled headlong into some kind of communism, not because of a mastermind like Lenin or Chairman Mao, but because people are just too stupid to manage their own affairs.People are getting stupider, not smarter. It must be something in the water. Archeologists determined that the collapse of Rome was partly due to people going mad because of lead poisoning from the pipes used to construct the city’s aqueducts. Judging from the societal freefall I am witnessing, I believe that people are getting progressively stupider with each passing day because of environmental pollution, which would certainly explain all the defective children being born. Nobody is right in the head anymore, this writer excepted, naturally. Let’s examine the facts:Super Bowl champion Plaxico Burress shoots himself in the leg, missing his nuts by inches, with a gun in his waistband that went off while he was adjusting his pants in a nightclub. The ensuing coverup includes his teammate Antonio Pierce, who hides the gun for Burress until he can hand it off to Burress’ wife, who is an attorney and who now risks being disbarred for participating in the coverup; the doctor at Cornell Medical Center, who risks losing her medical license for treating Burress for a gunshot wound and not notifying the police, as she is legally required to do; the hospital’s top administrator who professes to be ignorant about the procedure for reporting gunshot wounds to the police.As a result, Burress was suspended for the season without pay, indicted for felony weapons possession, which is punishable by up to 3 years in prison, forfeits a million dollars that he was supposed to receive this week from the Giants as the last payment of his $4.5 million signing bonus. What a genius!To make matters worse for the Giants, the next day their star defenseman, Shaun Ellis, was busted for transporting marijuana while speeding in his car without a valid license or insurance in New Jersey, and then they lose to the Eagles when Dominick Hixon blows an easy pass reception with nothing between him and the goal line except the ghost of Bill Belichick.But anybody who believes that our sports stars are the only ones who are off their rocker should take notice of the French rugby champion Marc Cécillon, who got twenty years for emptying a .357 Magnum into his wife at a dinner party and killing her in 2004.The appeals court judge, a woman, reduced Cécillon’s sentence from twenty years to fourteen, citing extenuating circumstances – he was drunk when he did it.If Plaxico Burress went to court in court in France, the judge would probably rule that he already suffered enough and award him damages. Nevertheless, when I see an item like this, it only confirms my conviction (maybe I shouldn’t use that word) that people are losing it.The legal profession not being exempt from this general deterioration of the spirit, Marc Dreier, the founder of a law firm with 250 attorneys, was caught red-handed in Toronto trying to impersonate a Canadian pension fund manager in an attempt to swindle a hedge fund out of $100 million. Any American who thinks that he can impersonate a Canadian to another Canadian is out of his mind. This guy was so used to putting it over on other bogus New Yorkers that he was completely divorced from reality. Now he is in jail. Frankly, I’d prefer to work for a living.Then there’s the story of the attorney who got shot standing up for the honor of his dominatrix. The New York Post ran a photo in its print edition of him wearing a garter belt and fishnet stockings but yanked it from its web site, probably at the insistence of his law firm, Paul Weiss, which probably did not feature the idea of its attorneys, even the deceased ones, being featured in the paper wearing girls’ panties.Anyway, Paul Weiss, a place this writer knows well from having worked there for a couple of years, is a well-known 50-storey nut house of perversity and perversion, the recipe for advancing there being that you have to be practically totally illiterate and totally off your rocker, which criteria did not fit me at all, which is why I eventually got shown the door. Just to show you, that firm’s star alumnus, non other than “I’m a freakin steamroller”, Eliot Spitzer, the governor who wore black socks for banging hookers while his justice apparatus was railroading people to jail for doing the same thing.Naturally, a distinguished law firm like Paul Weiss, where the men are women and the women are men, has continual staffing needs. In this they are assisted by a staffing professional who is just as exotic as the clients she serves, Kim Shamsky of VinMar Staffing. Kim is not just some tedious legal recruiter, but also a litigant in a $12 million dollar lawsuit against her ex-husband, former Mets first baseman Art Shamsky, whom she accuses in her court complaint , which was featured at the top of The Post's Page Six, as having transmitted to her every sexual disease known to science, which he picked up in the course of his philanderings with women, men and the Congo gorilla exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. Thank you, Kim, for opening up your crotch to us!Now the latest little divertissement which is being served up to entertain the public, even as the whole country is being sucked down the drain, is the Illinois governor, Blagojevich, whose main offense seems to be that he spits in the eye of political correctness. The Republicans are trying to indict him, though he has committed no crimes, and the Democrats are trying to impeach him because he uses a lot of profanity. Well, I don’t think any of that is going to happen. I’m not worried about Blagojevich’s chances. He’s tougher than all his detractors.Americans are going soft. Chicago mayor Richard Daley (the father) used to keep a punching bag in his office. New York mayor La Guardia once had a nude statue removed from City Hall Park because, he said, “I have to deal with big pricks all day long, and I don’t want to see one every time I look out my window.” These guys wouldn’t last long in the current environment, where Bloomberg is proposing dietary reform. Where people are so wrapped up in identity politics that they’re incapable of taking care of business. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and daddy’s money is running out.The new environment is going to be a lot more rigorous and more on the side of initiative, with less emphasis on fitting into a slot that was prepared for you.
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December 10, 2008
I, for one, am totally comfortable with the Chicago-ization of American politics. When Kennedy became president Boston became the model. For Reagan it was Beverly Hills. Clinton put Arkansas on the map. Now it’s Chicago’s turn, and it’s long overdue.I was born there under circumstances that would turn the stomach of any well-brought-up person and my life since then has been a total freakin scandal. But since I’m from Chicago I don’t care. As the current governor was heard to say over the wiretap, “Fuck ‘em!”The ascendancy of Chicago politics to the national level is a dismaying development for my girlfriend, Magpie, who has been trying to gentrify me for years, to make me acceptable to the mid-Atlantic middle class, who are perfectly suited to a life of low-brow plebian somnambulance. Now I am backsliding to the animal I always was. Oh, I have manners, but there aren’t that many people I care to impress.Don’t tell me that the considerations guiding Governor Blagojevich’s decision to appoint a new senator to replace Barack Obama are any different from what obtains in any of the other 49 states. It’s just that he stated them so poetically:“Fuck ‘em!”Who the hell are easterners to hold their nose (remember, the word Chicago is derived from the Indian word for stinkweed), when you consider what goes on around here, with McGreevey blowing guys in public toilets and Spitzer, whose alma mater, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton Garrison is famous for being a 50-story outhouse of perversity and deviate behavior.Compared to those idiots, Blagojevich is a straightforward, normal American – he discussed horse-trading the appointment, which is normal politics.This indictment against Blagojevich strictly refers to private internal deliberations he held with his political advisors and his friends. In no way did they catch him offering a quid pro quo to any outside party. Conspiracy, they call it. They are never going to find a jury in Chicago to convict him based on what I heard on television. This show trial, if the prosecutors have the nerve to pursue it, will be laughed right out of the courtroom.As for trying to force Tribune owner Sam Zell to get rid of some of his writers, the Tribune has always been a reactionary, red-baiting piece of garbage wrapping. Who cares what happens to that rag? Zell needs help to keep afloat and he is looking to the state to help him. Why should his stinking rag of a scandal sheet be excluded from the bargaining?The major question in my drunken mind is: what was the justification for requesting electronic surveillance of the Illinois governor anyway? Is this just a witch hunt by the Republican Justice Department and political elements of the FBI, like what they did to Clinton, to get something that might lead them to Obama? Are Republicans above that kind of behavior?It sure seems to me that the Republicans are drowning and they are grasping at straws trying to keep afloat. People deserve to know the process set in motion to get a judge to authorize the surveillance warrants against a sitting governor with no past history of criminal behavior.I don’t ever expect this case to ever go to trial. I believe that the wiretap evidence will be suppressed at the pretrial level.Nevertheless, if these entrapment tactics are indicative of the Republicans’ desperation strategy to stay afloat, it looks like Whitewater and Monica Lewinski all over again.
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Posted on 12/10/2008
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December 06, 2008
Cent millions d’euros
Pas mal pour un jour de travail
On visitera Harry Winston’s
Pour y faire une belle pagailleComment aimes-tu ma jupe de cuir
Je l’ai achetée rue St. Denis
Trouves-tu que c’est bien jolie
Pour voler une bijouterie ?On se reverra avenue Montaigne
J’ai des grenades dans mon sac a main
Un fusil de chasse dans mon manteau
Un pistolet dans sa rengaineTrouves-tu que mon rouge à lèvres
Va bien avec mon nez tordu
Crois-tu que j'suis bien fringuéPour faire un vol à main armée?On va faire une jolie pagaille
Au richissime triangle d’or
En cognant la sécurité
Et vidant tous les présentoirsPour vendre bijoux et diamants
On a une jolie clientèle
Pour profiter de notre pognon
A Miami ou au BrésilCent millions d’euros
Pas mal pour un jour de travail
On visitera Harry Winston’s
Pour y faire une belle pagaille***********************On aime bien l'avenue Montaigne
Elle a de si jolies rivières
Qui coulent brillantes et sereines
Au milieu de si jolies pierres
Consultants à cent million de l'heure
Monsieur Winston n'en était pas prêt
Alarmes et coffres c'était du beurre
Faut améliorer la sécurité
Belle jupe de cuir et beaux gants blancs
Achetés rue Saint-Denis
Il faut toujours s'habiller en travesti
Quand on va s'faire une bijouterie
Rouge à levres nez tordu poudré
Un pas sexy sur le trottoir
ll faut toujours bien présenter
Avant d'vider les présentoirs
On connaissait même tous les noms
Du petit personnel
Tous très gentils n'ont pas dit non
Je crois qu'ils auraient bien fait de même!
Miami be ready nous allons arriver
On a une belle clientèle
Et des rivières à écouler
Brillantes et fluides comme la mer...
On aime bien l'avenue Montaigne
Elle a de si jolies rivières
Qui coulent brillantes et sereines
Au milieu de si jolies pierres
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