March 29, 2009
Louisiana Governor Huey Long circa 1935Boo-hoo-hoo! Let me shed a tear for the poor, misunderstood bankers. All those years they were raking it in and people were mesmerized: these guys are geniuses, they figured out the art of alchemy, they are truly great humanitarians for creating so much value!It turns out they didn’t know shit. All their robbing of Peter to pay Paul came unraveled and, as usual, the emperor had no clothes. As one astute observer put it, when the tide goes out you find out who was swimming without a bathing suit.So now the cupboard is bare, and everybody is cleaned out. All the money went up in a puff of smoke. Not really. It has to be in somebody’s bank accounts. But we’ll get to that further on down the road.In the meantime, the bankers are screaming like stuck pigs because public opinion is insisting that banks that are receiving taxpayer bailouts must put a lid on the amount of compensation that can be looted by their corporate officers. They are insisting that if they can’t be allowed to continue steal, they will dig in their heels, refuse to cooperate and impede the flow of credit into the general economy. Presently at stake is whether banks should be forced to write down the hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless derivatives they hold for what they are worth (nothing) or whether the government should be forced to buy the derivatives at their face value and bail out bank equity holders. This is pure power politics, and the bankers are used to winning.For years they have been fighting against what they term “entitlements” for ordinary people like medical and unemployment insurance as “fiscal irresponsibility”. Translated into plain English that meant they were afraid it would come out of their share of the pie. Or, more plainly, it would mean less for them to steal.Wall Street has just as much, or more, of a sense of entitlements, only instead of food stamps it entails yachts, private jets and mansions. Try to separate the bankers from their entitlements, and they will literally go insane with rage.Capitalism, as it’s practiced in the Anglo-Saxon world, implies an unsentimental approach to other people’s interests. It’s pure power politics taken to the Darwinian level of survival of the fittest. This approach, while it may be appropriate for flesh-eating Comoro dragons in the jungles of Borneo, is not suitable for sophisticated human social organisms. Therefore banks, like any other economic structures, must be submitted to the same regulatory constraints as mineral extraction or food production, as a component of social organization.The banks are chafing against Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s proposal that they be compelled to set aside larger reserves against losses, because every dollar which must be added to reserves is a dollar out of their pockets. They are resisting regulation of swap deals which, as AIG demonstrated, swaps are just another term for wholesale stealing. Regulation of swaps, where reserves would have to be set aside against wagers, will effectively kill the whole derivatives industry.Fine, if their approach is “my way or the highway”, let the banks go under! Let the Treasury Department set up a new public bank, run by ethical civil servants, to serve as a model for a new banking system that operates in the public interest.Bankers are crying in fear and blaming the whole uproar on populist sentiment. And what is populism? It is public opinion that is not based upon manipulation by society’s elite. Populism is a boat that has been cut loose from its moorings and is now floating out of control. In past generations the system has found a way to safely ground populist opinion and tie it safely back to the dock.Only now there is no dock. There is no establishment structure in place to contain public opinion. There is only instability.Barack Obama cannot control it. Two or three more months down the line, his ceaseless interventions in the media will become irrelevant because he cannot count on the Democrats in congress to support him. As for the Republicans, they are meaningless.Obama is revealing himself to be a continuation of Bush, who assumed power expecting to govern on the basis of continuity, and was swamped by events beyond his comprehension. When Obama promised “change” he was anticipating a period of relative stability where he would be able to tinker around the edges of the system.Unfortunately, in both cases these politicians were inundated by a series of events that were beyond their comprehension.A Russian intelligence analyst, Igor Panarin, is predicting the imminent break-up of the United States. He may not be too far off the mark. The country is in a pre-revolutionary situation similar to Weimar Germany or the Kerensky Social Democratic regime that ran Russia until the Russian revolution. Before Americans begin crowing about Mexico being brought to disintegration by a few narco-terrorists, it should look to its own backyard.We can rule out a military takeover like that of General Franco in Spain, because the bulk of our military is extended halfway around the world in Iraq. But ultimately, new leadership is beginning to arise at the street level, like in France where young radical socialist Olivier Besançonot is gaining prominence that rivals that of president Nicolas Sarkozy.Populist sentiment is notoriously unstable. It tends to gravitate to authoritarian right-wing solutions. A lot depends on the personal magnetism of the leadership. Americans, not being grounded in ideological theology, could go either way. During the Depression of the 1930’s populist sentiment tended to gravitate to Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who presented a left-wing economic agenda, Every Man a King, with a right-wing personal style. Until he was assassinated.
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Posted on 3/29/2009
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March 26, 2009
A lot of people are very unhappy about our border with Mexico. A couple of years ago the complaint was about Mexicans sneaking into the U.S. in search of jobs. Now there are no jobs. Feel better?Now the great fear is about narco-violence spilling across the border. Mexican bandidos are killing each other, police, soldiers and innocent bystanders at the rate of 7-8,000 per year. This is a very insalubrious situation, and it needs to be addressed, but if the U.S. legalized marijuana it would remove one of the smugglers’ stock items, the same way that ending alcohol prohibition eliminated alcohol smuggling from Canada in the 1930’s. Now the descendents of the alcohol smugglers are among our most revered citizens, like the Bronfmans and the Kennedys.Any time you have borders, you have problems. Europe has for millennia indulged in a round robin of national, sectarian and religious violence, as have Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Central American republics of Honduras and El Salvador once engaged in a savage, bloody war over a soccer match. Fundamentally, people are no better than packs of apes or wild dogs, capable of switching from acts of incredible culture and refinement one minute to behaving like marauding army ants the next. The sooner we confront the beast within ourselves, like a demon or Jack the Ripper, the sooner we can mobilize our formidable resources to eliminate him. We have declared war on malaria, cholera and other scourges while turning a blind eye on what is arguably the greatest threat to public health, human aggression.The U.S. has been mostly spared the destructive fury of other nations because we have been isolated from the other large landmasses by oceans. We only have two neighbors, which are both weak. But with delivery systems and weapons becoming increasingly sophisticated, our sense of security is starting to break down, and certain citizens are freaking out about North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 proved that a determined adversary can wreak havoc right here on American soil, though both were partly due to our own government’s lackadaisical standard of vigilance.Conflict with Mexico has existed since the European immigrants, invited by that country to populate its Texas territory, aided by American adventurers and chafing at Mexico’s prohibition against slavery, rebelled and established the Texas Republic. Soon after, the administration of President Polk manufactured a bogus pretext for invading Mexico and forcing it to cede 50% of its territory in the biggest land grab in the history of the world, fulfilling the doctrine of Manifest Destiny – that it was our manifest destiny to have a contiguous territory from sea to shining sea.I’m not complaining. God Bless America. I dig having Route 66 stretching all the way from Chicago to the Santa Monica pier. We certainly made good use of it. No less a humanitarian than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, derisively referred to the Mexicans as “ 'greasers' who left all those resources undisturbed for centuries, and three years after we expropriated it we discovered gold in California".An equivalent today would be the Chinese flooding into Siberia and taking half of it, which has obviously occurred to the Russian Kremlin, because they have announced a project to spend $200 billion, which translates into a lot of rubles, to upgrade their military, and it’s doubtful that they feel threatened by the U.S. or Europe.Mexican-U.S. relations across the modern border have always been problematical, but mostly the threat has come from our side. In the 1880’s the Arizona Territory was infested by what were then derisively referred to as “cowboys”. These cowboys were not simple cowpunchers sitting around the campfire playing “Red River Valley” on their harmonicas. “Cowboy” was the term applied to itinerant gangsters, killers and livestock rustlers. When the great American chronicler of the old west, Louis L’Amour, wrote that the country “was not built by good men alone”, he was referring to these bastards, who constituted such a threat to life and property that even to this day Arizona society retains a vestigial hardened revulsion toward criminality and threats to public order.One specialty of these cowboys was to mount raids across the border into Mexico, where they would slaughter ranchers and drive their herds of livestock back into the States, where they sold them in industrial quantities to American wholesalers. Not that they just preyed on Mexicans. Any victim would do. Cowboy gangs were sufficiently strong and numerous that they terrorized the whole territory and inhibited investment by legitimate enterprises. They created such a state of insurrection that the territorial governor, John C. Fremont, requested the legislature to form a militia to attack and eradicate them. The Arizona Star newspaper adopted an editorial policy that called for the cowboys to be slaughtered without mercy:“The organization of a volunteer company of one hundred men to hunt them down or drive them out of the territory must evidently end with failures, from the fact that the cowboys are too strong for such a small force, and in a pitched fight would undoubtedly come out victorious, which would result in making the matters ten-fold worse than at present. We either must have a strong force for the work or not attempt it at all. It has been suggested that two companies of United States Cavalry be sent out to the section where the outlaws camp and stay after them… until they be forced to leave the territory or fight for their ground”.Unfortunately, Fremont could not convince the legislature to fund the enterprise and his initiative collapsed. They didn’t want to spend the money, reasoning that the U.S. Army was available to do the job at no cost to them. This failure to act by the legislature motivated the ranchers, who were being terrorized worse than the Mexicans were, to form a vigilante committee, which hung several rustlers. In the meantime, the rustlers assassinated several lawmen.U.S. President Chester A. Arthur ordered the U.S. military to intervene:“It has been made to appear satisfactorily to me that it has become impracticable to enforce, by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, the laws of the United States within that Territory, and that the laws therein have been forcibly opposed, and the execution thereof forcibly resisted, and whereas the laws of the United States require whenever necessary in the judgment of the President, to use military force”.The Mexican government also made a determined effort to secure their side of the border, building an army fort and conducting patrols.In the meantime, the cowboys continued to terrorize the territory by means of robbery, mayhem and murder. The only policeman to stand up to them was Tombstone Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp who, with his brothers and Doc Holliday, shot down the cowboy gang run by the Clanton brothers at the OK Corral.So this cross-border terrorism has deep roots in history on both sides. It might subside for a few years, but the ordinary distortions and contradictions of international intercourse will eventually manifest themselves in forms of conflict. The ancient civilization of Mexico can no more collapse because of the behavior of a relative handful of gangsters than the U.S. could be brought down by the bedlam initiated by an insignificant group of renegade cowboys. We are at least fortunate that in Secretary of State Clinton we have in authority a personage who will not abandon her composure should she happen to come under small arms fire.
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Posted on 3/26/2009
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March 25, 2009
Korean manager In Sik Kim says he has "no regrets". The World Baseball Classic ended in a blaze of glory Monday night as Asian championship teams from Japan and Korea fought out a nail-biting extra-inning showdown before a frenzied audience of 55,000 spectators at Dodger Stadium.Japan took a 1-0 lead in the third inning which Korea matched in the fifth on a long home run by Shin-Soo Choo, but Japan soon rebounded in the seventh on a skillfully placed bunt by Ichiro Suzuki, which led to Japan building a 3-1 lead that it held up to the last Korean batter in the bottom of the nineth inning, when a long Korean single drove in two runs, tying the game at 3-3 and sending the game into extra innings.Japan regained the advantage in the tenth on Ichiro's two run single, increasing its lead to 5-3. The MVP award went to Japan pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, but I thought Ichiro was the most exciting player to watch. Superb relief pitching by Japan's young star Yu Darvish kept the Koreans from recovering in the tenth, wrapping up the title for his country.This suspense filled finale capped a gripping, surprise packed tournament that rebounded with many shocks and upsets including elimination of the heavily favored Dominican team, sent packing by the Netherlands (!), the emergence of China as a possible future contender, elimination of the Cubans for the first time in fifty years, a gripping contest in Toronto, where the U.S. was barely able to hold off the Canadians, and many other surprises.The tournament showcased many emerging stars such as China's Ray Chang (from Kansas City) and Japan's Yu Darvish, exposed the U.S. public for the first time to the talents of Cuban pitching ace Pedro Lazo and hitters Yulieski Gourriel, Frederich Cepeda and Yoennes Cespedes; and provided a showcase for many MLB stars like David Wright, Ochiro Suzuki and Ivan Rodriguez, a free agent who landed a spot with the Astros on the strength of the leadership he displayed catching for Puerto Rico.The World Baseball Classic, while being followed closely in Latin America and Asia, was mostly ignored in the U.S. In an interview with ESPN, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said he would try to increase American interest in the next WBC, to be held in 2013, by prevailing on MLB owners to contribute their best players to the Team USA, as well as taking a more comprehensive national team approach to preparing for the tournament by starting preparations as early as January instead of letting the American players start cold against the Asian teams, who are thoroughly trained and prepared to participate as coherent team units at the beginning of the event.I believe that the World Baseball Classic is necessary for spreading baseball culture around the world, as well as serving as a showcase for foreign players to gain entry into MLB. If baseball can promote the national stars of other countries, it can gain entry into those markets the same way the NBA has achieved such notable success in China by recruiting their national hero Yao Ming to play for Houston, and in France, where Spurs' Tony Parker is revered.World Baseball Classic, I salute you!
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Posted on 3/25/2009
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March 23, 2009
Asian baseball player GODZILLA VS. THE MONSTER MAGNETRepent now, for the end is near! The Asian titans of baseball have awakened and the world will tremble as the shock waves of Baseball Armageddon spread out from Chavez Ravine to open a tectonic gap in the San Andreas fault into which the known world will descend in a boiling cauldron of flaming hickory.As the prophet Astrodamus predicted many centuries ago “a cowhide sphere will arise in the east to eclipse the sun and the moon on the eighth day following the Ides of March, and A-Rod and Bud Selig will be sucked, screaming, into the abyss below”.I saw it coming and, like a modern day Cassandra, my entreaties were laughed off as the deluded ravings of a lunatic manioc. Field your best players, I screamed. Do batting practice and fielding practice. Respect the Japanese as a serious adversary! But oh no! It was like Pearl Harbor all over again. The Chrysanthemum Empire struck while A-Rod was kissing himself in the mirror and the Wilpons family was in civil court trying to claw back their stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the bloodsucking fiend Madoff.The only other blogger who saw the end coming was Cuban president-for-eternity Fidel Castro, who wrote in the Communist paper Granma, “the yanqui imperialistas will be brought down low by the resurgent forces of Imperial Japan”. Nobody took him seriously either, writing him off as a sore loser with a grudge to settle, just because we tried to assassinate him a couple of times.Well, forget him! We got bigger fish to fly. This WBC championship game between Japan and Korea must be stopped immediately before it creates an oompapa in the earth’s crust right in the secret underground dump by the LaBrea tar pits on Wilshire Boulevard, where they keep the pools of old poison gas and obsolete germ bombs which will send California floating into the Pacific Ocean, transforming Las Vegas into beachfront real estate.Governor Schwartznegger must act immediately to expropriate Dodger Stadium under the doctrine of eminent domain and tear it down to construct a new freeway to Pomona, or the free world will be lost to the Asiatic whordes.These Japanese and Korean players are not human beings. They are robots created by Mitsubishi Industries, with electronic sensors to track the ball and bionic legs designed for stealing bases. The baseballs, which are manufactured in China, contain directional finders that are connected to computer chips buried deep in the center field bleachers.They must be stopped!
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Posted on 3/23/2009
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March 22, 2009
Korea 10, Venezuela 2Most Americans could care less about watching this tournament, and it's a good thing for them. Maybe, like Shakespeare's "King Lear", where a deranged sovereign throws everything away, the ponderous cultural magnitude of the event is too much to process, because for a nation addicted to the facile notion of "feeling good about yourself", the harsh global realities which are being distilled into a relatively simple game of baseball are simply too punishing to accept.I left the bar after witnessing a Venezuelan team of Major League stars being whiplashed for seven innings by a Korean team of players who mainly learned the game by playing in a corporate sandlot league. On my way home I learned that Carlos Guillen had hit a homer. Big deal, that brought the massacre up from 10-1 to 10-2.Up to that point, I had watched in utter despair as the Venezuelans had given up 5 runs in the first inning on terrible pitching, errors, and concentrated Korean power hitting and proceeded to go downhill from there. The Venezuelans couldn't catch the ball, couldn't throw straight, no focus, nothing. The Koreans processed every inning like an assembly line, with quality precision, just like they had been drilled to do. For them, this Venezuelan game was just a way station on the way to their final destination - an apocalyptic Monday night showdown with their archrivals, the Japanese.I don't expect the U.S. to fare much better tonight against Japan. We are just a final hurdle for them as well. The Japanese are living a dream of revenge on the Koreans for beating them out of the 2008 Olympic gold medal. These two teams are living out the continuation of a regional geopolitical rivalry stretching back hundreds and thousands of years. We are irrelevant to them.Now that the game of baseball has gone international, it has taken on the tooth-and-nail characteristics of international soccer, which is less a game than a continuation of war by other means. It's poignant that the game as it's played in Korea started fundamentally as an offshoot of corporate culture. The players were expected to uphold the honor of their companies, which instilled in them the same meticulous training methods that turned South Korea into an industrial powerhouse. Formation, training, study and adherence to authoritarian hierarchy. Players are expected to train until they're told to stop, to study until they're exhausted, not to talk back. It's the old joke about the tourist in New York who asks the cop, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" The cop answers, "Practice".Anybody who wants an answer to why we do not make one television, one radio and, pretty soon, one automobile in this country, why our whole industrial production has shifted to the orient, why we are playing pocket pool and hemorrhaging money, even as the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans are building huge surpluses, would do well to watch a replay of this game. The Koreans showed up early, did fielding practice, did batting practice, were warmed up and ready to play in advance of the first pitch.By contrast, the Venezuelans sauntered in, watched a few minutes of a tape of the opposition pitcher they expected to face, suited up and went onto the field cold. What did they think, that they would use the first couple of innings to get warmed up? Next thing they knew, they were behind by five runs. The North American approach to the sport is too casual, too self-indulgent. I used to do a lot of boxing, and the first thing you learn is, always take your opponent seriously.Some readers might object that this sports blog is not the appropriate place to air such grievances, but with the fusion of sport and power politics, particularly in the case of Korea, which has taken the industrial approach to baseball, such transferences are inevitable.
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Posted on 3/22/2009
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March 21, 2009
Cuban pitcher Pedro Lazo Last year I worked 60-70 hrs. a week and made OK money, but my life was in suspended animation. I put on 25 lbs. and my body turned into a shapeless mass of greasy suet. I didn't get to watch even one sporting event, and I completely miss out on the Olympic Games.This year, thanks to the miracle of modern economics, I am out of work. I am going to the gym 5-6 times a week. My body still looks like a freakin no-fly zone, but I am putting myself back together one emaciated muscle group at a time.Best of all, as if to make up for all the sports I missed, I have got the World Baseball Classic to welcome me back to the real world. Thank you MLB for putting meaning back in my life. I am enjoying watching this international baseball, with its great global talent and national rivalries, so much that I don't know whether to spit or wind my wristwatch.It has been a personal blow to me as each team has been eliminated from the competition. They are all so deserving and inspiring to watch! When the Dominican Republic team was sent home, I personally mourned for them as a friend of that country, which I have enjoyed visiting many times, not to mention all the great Dominican friends I have had here in New York over the years. The Dominican people have been like family to me through my work experiences and from a period whan I first arrived in the City, when I had the privilege to live in their exciting barrio of Washington Heights. When I speak Spanish, I speak it with a distinctly Dominican inflection that I learned from them.But I also feel close to the great Mexican people, in whose country I have also spent many wonderful vacations, and whose historic culture going back many millennia I have had the honor to learn and appreciate to such an extent that I feel partly Mexican myself.Naturally, as an American, I want to salute the Puerto Rican team, representing as it does a race of people who are as important to the historical development of baseball as any in the world, and who have contributed a pantheon of great athletes, past and present, who have endowed the sport with much dedication and breathless excitement.Naturally, at the pinnacle of all this Latin glory is the godhead of Caribbean baseball, the Cubans, whose monumental contribution to the sport has been partly eclipsed by petty political considerations that have nothing to do with the sport. If you accept my reasoning that baseball is life itself, then all the meaningless partisan bickering that has stood in the way of the sport's transcendent status as the ultimate expression of world athletic culture has only served to demean the human race and denude it of dignity and majesty.Never mind that. I have come to praise baseball, not to bury it.At the Cuba-Mexico showdown the Cuban team was positively balletic in its performance. The hitting, notably the tandem Gourriel, Cepeda, Cespedes was so mechanical that anything that was presented in the strike zone got hit. Cuban baserunning and stealing was poetry-in-motion. The Cuban starter, Jorge Vera, dominated Mexico's hitters for the first five innings by means of a smooth slider, change-up and 90s mph fastball, presiding over a 5-2 advantage into the fifth inning, when he was replaced by Cuba's all-time greatest pitcher, Pedro Lazo, a portly, powerful hurler who so thoroughly dominated the action for the rest of the game that it was rather like watching a bullfighter controlling a reging, impulsive bull. Lazo, totally unflappable, just brushed off the Mexican hitters like flies. In the seventh inning the Cuban batters went through their entire order, Cespedes getting two hits in the inning, the second a stand-up triple bringing the Cuban advantage to 7-2, leaving the Mexicans to try to play catch up for the remainder of the game.The only threat to Lazo came from an eighth inning home run from Jorge Cantu, fillowed by a hard single by Garcia, but Lazo shut that down. Mexico scored another run by HR in the nineth, but it was too little too late to make a dent in Cuba's big lead. Nevertheless, It was enough to keep me glued to my barstool until the final out.The action on the field was matched by fan enthusiasm in the stands with some of the Mexican fans showing up in traditional outfits, including a full-dress Aztec warrior. The beautiful thing about Latin culture being that there is no age restriction for having a good time, it being disrespectful for younger persons to admonish their elders to "act their age". North America, with its hubristic, though largely ignorant younger generation, could take a tip from these wiser, more traditional cultures.Additionally, there was the thrill of an interview with historic Mexican pitching ace Fernando Valenzuela, who is now that country's pitching coach. Just seeing a guy like him still in the game, enhances the continuity of baseball through the generations. Dave Winfield and Tony Gwinn also made cameo appearances.Unfortunately, the stooge sitting next to me in the bar, who was no sportsman, freakin ruined my good time. the guy leans over and sez to me, "Wouldn't it be great if the whole Cuban team defected?" I'm sure a lot of pinheads get off on the concept of the Cubans being robbed of that country's greatest achievement. I guarantee you, the team's hotel was beseiged by two-bit hustlers hanging around like fly-catching lizards, waiting for a Cuban baseball plsyer to emerge like a young girl getting off a Greyhound bus at Port Authority Bus Terminal. "I can get you a big-league contract, millions of bucks etc."Why should these guys defect? For the money? These are ball players, not MBAs. So they can be like Jose Contreras, who signed a contract with the Yankees only to have George Steinbrenner berate him and call him a lot of dirty names, so unnerving him that he had to get out of New York completely?OK, these Cuban ball players don't have millions of bucks. They make $500 a month. They get a house, a car and a cell phone. But they are national heroes. The people worship the ground they walk on. Cuba has a law on the books making baseball the official national sport. And after they get through playing baseball they got a job for life. Baseball, beaches, rum and an 1957 Ford Fairlane - who could ask for more? Why defect to a crashing economy, confusion and geeks like A-Rod, who can't decide if he's coming or going anymore, whose latest gaffe is having himself pictured in a fruit magazine kissing himself in a mirror, who dates a deranged, mangy skank like Madonna, a person so rancid that her ex-husband, Guy Ritchie, can't even bring himself to refer to her as a person, but rather as "it".Cuba's national team has played in fifty world tournaments. Out of the fifty, it has placed first in 42 and second in 8. That's why they were a sure bet to progress to the next round. There was just one minor detail standing in their way - Japan.The Japan game took place the following evening. An ominous fog hung over Petco Stadium, reminiscent of the opening scene of a Godzilla movie. The Japanese had a good luck charm in attendence, in the form of Sadaharu Oh, the historical home run king of world baseball, with 838 lifetime HRs to his record. He's old now, and not well, but what would be the psychological effect on the U.S. team if it had Babe Ruth sitting in the stands wearing a team jacket? The Cuban team, for all its formidable ability was, in the words of ESPN color commentator, Orel Hershieser, "a little afraid of Japan".And with good reason. the Japanese, unlike the Americans, who were apprehansive about committing their first-tier talent in advance of the regular season for fear of injury (which turned out to be justified, considering the number of Americans who had to withdraw from the tournament because of various ailments), had fielded the cream of that country's formidable talent, a veritable Asian baseball tsunami. the team boasts, in addition to 5 MLB all-stars, an inestimable wealth of domestic stars, all of whom would be suitable to play for the American Major Leagues. Hersheiser, whose invaluable narration, informed as it is by many years of championship play, added immensly to my appreciation of the series, had this to say about Japanese baseball: "When I had the opportunity to tour Japan in 1988 with the Dodgers after we had won the World Series, we didn't really respect their ability. We thought they were all right but not at professional level. Now I'm amazed at the progress they've made, and the level of their ability".All throughout the series, when referring to Asian baseball, Hersheiser keeps referring to the commitment that those countries have made in terms of work ethic, studying of American baseball techniques and adherence to the fundementals.Throughout the game, although the Cubans fought valiantly to keep up with the Japanese machine, cracks started showing up in their defense. In the fourth inning the Cuban pitcher, Yunieski Maya, yielded a single and a double, putting Japanese at second and third. The following hitter, Aoki, hit a long fly ball to center, which center fielder Yoennes Cespedes had to catch back-handed while running towards the center field wall. Unfortunately, the ball bounced off the heel of his glove and got away from him for an error, allowing the two Japanese runners to score. This was the crack in the dam of the Cuban defense which turned into an inondation in the following innings. Cespedes redeemed himself later in the game with a magnificent stand-up triple in the sixth inning, but by then the damage to Cuban team's composure was irreparable.After Cespedes' error in the fourth, Cuban manager Eugenio Velez, replaced pitcher Maya with Yulieski Gonzalez, but Gonzalez began bickering with the catcher, Pastano, which only added to the team's disarray. The dispute became so intense that the two players had to be held apart in the dugout, and Gonzalez had to be taken out of the game in his turn.Ultimately, Cuba collapsed completely 5-0 and were sent home without winning or placing for the first time in almost 50 years. Nevertheless, the outstanding hitting performance of the team's offensive line-up of Yourriel, Cespedes and Cepeda ought to go a long way toward keeping the country's sense of honor intact.This set the stage for a seeding match between Japan and Korea, which is the most intense rivalry of the series. Historically, these two countries, separated by the Sea of Japan, have for centuries been geopolitical rivals as only neighbors can be. This rivalry has naturally extended to sport, with the Japanese having taken the 2006 WBC and Korea winning the gold medal at the 2008 Olympics. After Korea beat Japan 1-0 in an earlier seeding match, Japan right fielder Oshiro Suzuki vowed to "crush them". This is not the sporting attitude that MLB wishes to promote, and when Korea beat Japan for a second time during the series, Suzuki was advised to dummy up regarding the press.Nevertheless, nobody told the Koreans to clam up, and after their second win against Japan they decided to have a little impromptu ceremony on the field, where they planted a tiny Korean flag on the pitcher's mound while the Japanese seethed in their dugout.This motivated the Japanese to go out and kick some Korean butt, which they did in Thursday night's seeding match, by a score of 6-2. Myself not having a dog in this fight, being a Team USA fan, I was nonetheless mesmerized by the tooth and nail battle of desperation being waged by these two national teams, even as the larger, stronger Koreans were worn down by Japanese precision pitching, power hitting and speedy baserunning.But this is not to say that the Japanese enjoy a definitive advantage as the series progresses. Given the historical predisposition of these two countries for riotous behavior, if they advance to the championship stage stadium spectators would be advised to bring their helmets. May the best maniacs win!
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Posted on 3/21/2009
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March 16, 2009
If you believe that this is the end of endlessly shoveling money into the AIG black hole, think again. The other shoe has yet to drop.AIG was forced by political pressure to reveal the names of the banks it has paid to fulfill its obligations with regard to the CDO credit default swaps, insurance policies against default of the worthless sub-prime mortgage securities. Here are some of the policyholders who were paid off:Goldman Sachs – $12.9 bn
Société Générale - $11.9 bn.
Deutsche Bank - $11.8 bn.
Barclays Bank - $7.9 bn.The above, totaling $45 bn. is just a partial list. These policies were presumably paid at 100% of the face value of the contracts. In addition, AIG paid $27.1 bn. to other bondholders at a discount to be released from outstanding contracts. AIG paid out another $43.7 bn. to satisfy obligations of its securities lending program.AIG, though legally subject to regulation by the New York Insurance Department, which compels insurance companies to set aside reserves to pay off insurance policies, benefited from a loophole that classified these contracts not as insurance policies but as financial instruments. Therefore they didn’t bother to set aside reserves.The SEC didn’t regulate them either. AIG just wrote policies on the sub-prime mortgage-backed securities and pocketed the money, assuming that since the securities were rated AAA by the rating agencies, they couldn’t fail. They just pocketed the money as profit. Easy money. It later was revealed that the rating agencies were in the pocket of the bond issuers.These contracts weren’t cheap. In order to protect themselves from the bonds defaulting, the banks paid a high premium: $500,000 plus 25% of the nominal price of the bond. Billions. Hundreds of billions. When the bonds defaulted, the banks presented the policies for payment.AIG didn’t have anywhere near that kind of coin. Nobody does. They were prostrate. Fortunately for AIG, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury was Hank Paulson, who happened to be the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Paulson arranged for AIG to get the bailout, and the first creditor to be paid was Goldman Sachs.Since then AIG, who are the slickest operators in the universe, have been stringing along the Treasury Department like a game fish, the same way Madoff strung along the SEC. These regulators are divided into two categories: boy scouts who don’t have a clue and paid operatives of the banks.I’m not going to cry crocodile tears for the taxpayers. Every step of the way they were apprised as to what was going on. The politicians told them, “We are going to end regulation of business”. Did you think they were kidding? They said, “America is all about getting rich”. Did you think they were kidding?(Let me ask you this. If they said they were going to end police presence in your neighborhood and rely on the enlightened self-interest of citizens, would you believe that?)You can’t cheat an honest man. Madoff said, “Don’t ask me what I’m doing”. His suckers, er, clients, said, “Whatever he’s doing, I don’t want to know. He’s putting money in my pocket”. They forgot the old maxim of “There’s no honor among thieves”.Now AIG is insisting on paying $160 mn. in bonuses, yet, to the traders who sold these policies to the banks. With a straight face, they are saying “We have a contract with these agents. We have to respect our obligations”.No you don’t. You can refuse to pay them and let them sue you if they really feel they earned the money. AIG has been nationalized and the interest of the taxpayers has to be factored into the equation. If you contracted a guy to fix your roof and the rain came into your living room in buckets, the contract would not be legally binding, right?I worked in the insurance industry for a while, and I know who would be a perfect fit to throw out that bum, Liddy, and replace him at AIG. The person I am thinking of is a French insurance CEO, and he turned around a company that, though much smaller, was faced with exactly the same issues AIG is. Also, he works for peanuts, relatively speaking, because he is philosophically against the ethic of greed. But I can’t say his name because I signed a confidentiality agreement, and if I shoot my mouth off too much I will wind up in a world of shit.The problem today is, most people have never had a real job or done any kind of business. Financial writers are hired right out of journalism school, and they are set up by the newspapers as instant gurus. Politicians and bureaucrats are processed like Kraft cheese slices and then slapped into assembly line sandwiches. It’s “Brave New World”, where you’re classified as Alpha, Beta or Delta. This system is not going to end until the whole thing crashes completely, because people are not geniuses. Anything but. The schools are churning out MBAs and MAs which are worth nothing because the grade inflation has reached such a critical mass that professors give out As and Bs to students just for showing up in class. What kind of education do you call that? I overheard a couple of newly minted attorneys discussing the bar exam:“I did OK on the multiple choice, but I had a real problem on the written part of the exam”. Knowing this guy, I bet! Next time you have to go to court, remember that.Then they go into the labor market and they think they’re still in school. No, worse, they think the employer is in loco parentis, and they expect to be indulged 100%.Forget it, kid, I ain’t your freakin daddy.A long time ago this old industrial guy, Jack Callari, was complaining to me about the low quality of workers he had to hire. He told me “I hate to say it, but what this country needs is a good depression.” Well, it’s here. People are going to have to work their way up the ladder. Former Japanese finance minister Eisuke Sakakibara put it succinctly: “After the recession is over things will be very different. The American age is over”. The only problem is, there aren’t any well-paying industrial jobs like there used to be. MBAs are going to be working in coffee bars, and glad to have the work. As for the diploma, you can frame it and hang it up next to your AIG shares.But that isn’t the worst of it. I was saving the best for laffs. Here’s the other shoe. Remember the credit default swaps? Well, the figures released by AIG show their exposure going forward to still be in the neighborhood of 2 trillion dollars. At the rate of $160 billion a year, we should have it paid off around 2020.
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Posted on 3/16/2009
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March 15, 2009
Here is a shocking statistic: Sweden, with a population of 12 million, has created 400,000 jobs in the alternate energy sector. This is a hopeful omen for U.S. industry, with our abundance of wind and solar power. Solar panels alone, a proven technology, on government installations and private property throughout our southern and western regions, not to mention an export market of sun-drenched countries stretching from Mexico to Brazil, could probably account for millions of immediately profitable opportunities.It doesn’t hurt that Vice-President Joe Biden takes the train each night from Washington DC to his home in Wilmington DE, and is a confirmed supporter of Amtrak. This writer has long bemoaned the official U.S. policy of benign neglect for passenger rail service, leaving Americans to travel long distance at a snail’s pace under lamentable conditions, even as European countries and Japan develop ever more efficient networks of train service and export them to emerging countries like China. They have put into service bullet trains and magnetic levitation trains that literally fly over the tracks, while Americans are forced to endure cattle car conditions in dilapidated monstrosities. All that is coming to an end now as Congress passes, and President Obama signs, over Republican howls of anguish, funding bills enabling an exponential upgrade of passenger rail service.Mostly everything in the U.S. is obsolete, owing to an economic model that is wedded to a 19th century notion of a marketplace that solves problems out of enlightened self-interest. Put succinctly, my self-interest may be detrimental to yours. Just because this approach may have worked in 1889 does not mean that it is appropriate for 2009, but that is the line that is still being vaunted by those sectors whose philosophy is to stint on innovation while paying huge shareholder dividends.Our present social system is as obsolete as our rolling stock. Americans are force fed a philosophy of rugged economic individualism, which promotes infighting at every level of activity, while more cooperative forms of commercial culture like Japanese notions of teamwork are derided as mass conformism and European systems of social welfare are condemned as diabolical plots to sap initiative.Where is the impetus for these attacks coming from? The same coalition of big business interests and social conservatives that got us into this mess.I don’t believe the American electorate has swung to the left. I believe they are giving the Democrats a chance to show what they can do in dismay over the present economic model, which has proved a disaster. In this the Democrats are being helped by the dismal performance of the Republicans in opposition. Eventually, though, the Republicans will develop an effective line of attack, and by then Obama had better be prepared to demonstrate that his strategy is working, or the country will be subject to yet another round of antediluvian obstructionism.The British seem to be creeping away from the Anglo-Saxon model of economic triumphalism, as well they might, considering the legacy of Thatcherism that has left their economy in a shambles of debris. British business secretary Lord Mandelson, in a meeting with French industrialists, advocated a central coordinating strategy for Britain of setting long-term goals and objectives in energy and transport and creating the infrastructure for high-speed trains and aerospace, and establishing incentives for British industry of conform to those objectives.By expressing those goals, the British seem to be giving voice to the unstated ambitions of the Obama administration, which is moving in that direction.A recent study showed that, contrary to the popular image of the Scandinavian countries as a region of suicidal drunkards, they are the happiest people in the world. Evidently, all the social engineering to which they have been subjected for several generations has left them with a relatively carefree attitude with regard to their prospects. And far from having their initiative leeched from them, they seem to have adapted quite nicely to modern economic circumstances, with innovation and new industries such as green technologies and telecommunications.The challenge to President Obama would now seem to be to communicate his strategic vision to Americans and the world at large, and to reassure holders of American debt that their investment is secure. He is an adequate speaker, but his seems to be the only voice capable of advancing a coherent message. Obviously, not too many Americans possess the oratorical elegance of a Lord Mandelson. Nevertheless, the administration needs to speak with more than one voice. Might Obama not enlist the one speaker whose elocutionary talents surpass even his – Bill Clinton?
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Posted on 3/15/2009
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March 13, 2009
The Dutch language elegantly refers to baseball as honkball, which makes their team the world's greatest honkies. Lately the world has been getting a college education in Dutch baseball, or Honkbal Hoofdklasse. Look at it this way, these guy don't need steroids, they have world-class reefer, which is totally legal there. Michael Phelps, eat your heart out! If they catch Sidney Ponson sucking a bong, he doesn't have to say he's inhaling Vicks for a chest cold.I'm not going to bore the reader with lame jokes about how this Dutch team can run bases in wooden shoes. I wouldn't do a stoopid thing like that. This World Baseball Classic is full of shockers, like the Italian team beating Canada. Try to figure out how a motley bunch of meatball heroes beat a Canadian team full of MLB stars! I said it before, and I'll say it again: the Canadian team was putting out bad vibes. Anyway, the Italians are flat as a pizza now after their pitching totally collapsed and the Venezuelans used them for a homerun derby until they just got tired of hitting any more and decided to go out for a little fielding practice.Never mind that. I'm convinced the Dutch team put a zombie hex on the Dominicans, who all believe in Santeria, scaring and paralyzing them with fear by sending them dolls with pins stuck in them and bloody chicken heads. This is historical fact. The island of Hispanola, shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is the world voodoo capital. Aruba and Curacao are historical pirate redoubts. What you had here was "Pirates of the Caribbean" with baseballs.In the Second Round the Dutch have to go up against Venezuela's big bats, as well as Puerto Rico, who already stomped them 6-0, and the U.S., who aren't likely to be impressed by any boiling cauldrons with goats' heads floating around in them. This round will likely witness The Kingdom of Orange being crushed to concentrate and shipped home as orange juice.There is so much baseball going on that I am going cross-eyed trying to keep up with it. Mexico avenged itself on Australia, putting it on the freakin barbie and grilling it 12-1, and sending it hopping back home like a kangeroo, despite the fact that Australian pitchers have a secret pitch that turns around in mid-air and flies back to the mound. The second round in LA promises to be World War III all over again, with Mexico, Cuba, Korea and Japan competing, but I am not getting it here in New York, which is really driving me nuts. I didn't get any First Round games from Mexico City, and I feel as though some ESPN executives should be buried up to their heads and used for home plate.I am starting to understand why countries end up fighting pitched battles over sporting events. I tell you frankly, if Canada had defeated the U.S. in baseball, I would have supporting an invasion."Screw you, freakin hoseheads! You think you're so hot? Let's see if you're still laughing when we invade your soil and rip off all your oil!"Geez, what am I saying? All this sports is starting to disease my mind. Anyway, I'm not the only one. When Korea defeated Japan 1-0 in a seeding match to decide who plays whom in Round 2, Japan outfielder Ichiro Suzuki raged, "I want to CRUSH them!"I think I need to chill out, drink some Dutch Heineken beers and watch some honkball.
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Posted on 3/13/2009
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March 13, 2009
A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this space how President Obama better be careful that he isn’t the target of a Republican hit squad. My reasoning was that now that the GOP is totally out of power and disabled, it makes them doubly desperate and dangerous.Probably, one or two readers of this site figured me to be a paranoid psychotic. I’m willing to run that risk. The way I figure it, how many Roman emperors, Julius Caesar to name one, were done in by their loyal opposition?It turns out that I was just a couple of weeks premature in formulating my little theory. Last night on MSNBC, investigative reporter Seymour Hirsch, who has built a career by exposing deadly conspiracies and cover-ups dating back to the Vietnam war, revealed the existence of a CIA death squad directed by Republican former vice-president Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who bypassed legal procedures and sent out teams to perform assassinations in at least ten countries. What elements of information these pineappleheads were taking into consideration, and whether their intended targets were limited only to rogue islamists, or whether they were guided by their own zany proclivities, is anybody's guess.That doesn’t shock me in the least. Anyway, as a person who was working in an office two blocks from Ground Zero when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, I had to walk through the unbelievable mess created on Wall Street after the towers collapsed. I remember thinking that whatever it took, we as a country had to get at the people who did that to us. Seeing the chaos up-close and first hand, as I did, a person might be excused for hoping for a little payback.The problem is, any assassination that had to be performed should have been authorized with the assent of Congress, who would have gladly assisted, and not by a handful of equally deranged lunatics operating independently within the executive branch.When you set up a mechanism like that, answerable only to a couple of crackpots like Cheney and Rumsfeld, with their marbles rolling around in their heads like a pinball machine, where does it end? Remember, a school of thought still exists that attributes the Kennedy assassination to a CIA network that was formed to get rid of Fidel Castro, and, failing to get at him, decided to do the (in their minds) next best thing – get Kennedy.Anybody who believes that the Roman Empire, where more than one emperor was done in by the very people assigned to protect him, the Praetorian Guard, is ancient history better smoke some medical marijuana. In fact, the Romans were so distrustful of their military establishment that they had a law banning the Roman army from entering the city of Rome.This might explain why Barack Obama is not in any hurry to bring the troops home from Iraq, knowing that they could be used to maintain order in the event of a coup d’état engineered against him. Those individuals who believe that the Republicans are not capable of staging a coup need only recall the 2000 presidential elections.This Cheney-Rumsfeld death squad revelation should remind our politicians that the Republicans have still got teeth, and that they are not above banging a few heads together to achieve power. People have got to wrap their minds around the fact that this is power politics, and not a high school civics lesson.
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Posted on 3/13/2009
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March 11, 2009
I believe Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to be correct in closing down the revolting “Bodies Revealed” exhibition in Venezuela, which he referred to as an example of “moral decomposition”. But the situation is much worse than that.Not only is the concept of exhibiting skinned human cadavers encased in plastic nauseating and contemptible, but there is a real concern that these are the bodies of Chinese prison inmates who died while they were under detention, as was brought out in a New York lawsuit.Additionally to be considered is the paranormal aspect of whether we are not invoking the wrath of the spirit world in displaying the putrefied remains of the deceased in a debased and depraved sideshow environment.There is a “Bodies” exhibit on display at New York’s South Sea Seaport, exactly one block from the AIG corporate headquarters and two blocks from Wall Street. I have questioned on my blog site and on my web site whether installing such a damaging paranormal phenomenon so close to our financial center risks invoking bad “feng shui”, or spiritual imbalance, adjacent to a financial capital where momentous decisions are taken that affect the entire world.I am thankful to Hugo Chavez for having the consideration to raise this painful subject. Removing the “Bodies” exhibit from the vicinity of Wall Street must be immediately effected to restore psychic balance so that considerations can be taken in an environment of harmony and tranquility. ">Might not have some of the horrendous business decisions, as well as the current sense of disorientation during the last few years, been affected by these monstrous objects located so close to the centers of power?Chavez is the only political leader with the insight to confront this unhealthy entertainment for what it is – a freak show exploiting the remains of tragically deceased persons who mysteriously died while they were obviously still healthy, it not being likely that the exhibitors would be displaying diseased or wasted remains, invoking the wrath of spiritual forces.
There is obviously something sinister going on here, as though the forces of evil, erupting so close to Wall Street, were trying to unleash chaos in the world financial markets and destroy civilization. 200motels
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Posted on 3/11/2009
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March 09, 2009
The storybook career of Ray Chang is proof that America has not run out of steam by any stretch of the imagination. It’s also proof that, by following the inspiration of President Obama, we can conquer the world using love instead of insults, threats and steel. Hollywood doesn’t need to go any further than Ray Chang’s reality to inspire people to achieve unbelievable results.Chang is an American whose parents emigrated from China and opened a Chinese restaurant in Kansas City. Following the instincts of any kid who ever grew up in this country, he made baseball his dream. He went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a shortstop position at a Dodgers open try-out session where, unbelievably, considering the odds, they signed him to a minor league contract. Eventually the Dodgers traded him to the Pirates farm organization.Last year Chang received an invitation from the Chinese government to travel to that country as a consultant for their baseball program. Traveling around that country, Chang trained China’s baseball team to participate in the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing, where the team had its first notable success in defeating its arch-rival, the accomplished Taiwan team, which had the immeasurable advantage of several generations of baseball culture and a world-famous baseball infrastructure consisting of a professional league and multiple Little League world championships.The Chinese sports ministry, impressed by Chang’s athletic ability and devotion to the game, decided to invite him to participate in this year’s World Baseball Classic, where his authoritative presence in the infield and power hitting in a second victory over Chinese Taipei ensured him future coaching jobs in China and brought him to the attention of all the managers, GMs and owners here in the States.Ultimately, China was eliminated after being devoured 14-0 like a dim sung by the powerful Korean machine. Nevertheless, Ray Chang’s fine talent and leadership has gained him entrance to the Forbidden City of MLB’s front office.
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Posted on 3/9/2009
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March 09, 2009
Ivan Rodriguez I am happy to report that the DR team is back to their natural awesome form after their freaky defeat to the motley of collection of misfits from Netherlands, led by major nut job pitcher Sidney Ponson, who served time in Aruba for beating up a judge and got thrown off the Texas Rangers for antisocial behavior before getting picked up by the Yankees and having a decent year. Manager Felipe Alou and the Dominican team refuse even to discuss how Ponson and his crew of rodeo clowns were able to upset one of the hottest baseball teams ever fielded in a tense nail-biter of a game. This is because, as adherents to the supernatural cult of Santeria, the Dominicans recognize Ponson as being a voodoo witch. There's no other explanation for what he pulled off. Any baseball fan who is not glued to this series is crazy, because things are happening here that defy rational analysis.The DR team, who are all physically robust veterans like Pedro Martinez, Miguel Olivo, David Ortiz, Endy Chavez and Tony Pena, immediately asserted total dominance with masterful pitching, fielding and huge homeruns to win 9-0 over Panama and stay in the series, but they won't forget Ponson for the rest of their lives.I feel bad for Panama, which is a nifty little team of young hustlers. They're hot stuff, but they are not totally developed as players yet so they don't have the strength to hit the ball over the fence. If they had drawn one of those goofy teams like Australia or South Africa instead of monster teams like Puerto Rico and the DR, who are realistically too much for a team at their stage of development, they would have survived to the second round, which would have been good baseball, because they are a very entertaining group of hustlers.Puerto Rico could have saved a lot of money by just fielding Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez and giving the rest of the team a day off. Pudge, who is a very scary dude, was himself responsible for 2 HRs, a double, single, 4 RBIs and a stolen base, comprising practically the whole team's 7-0 production against Panama. The shocking aspect is that he does not have a contract this year, so this series is a great showcase to remind owners and GMs why he is a Hall of Fame shoe-in. I want to bet that he ends up with Manny Ramirez in Joe Torre's elephants graveyard. Torre should consider signing Ponson as well, who would naturally fit in perfectly in LA.The great thing about this tournament is that you forget about "I hate Boston" or "I hate Philly". The important thing is USA against the world. But the charm is also in widening the geographical and cultural scope of the sport to exotic locales like Tokyo, Mexico City and San Juan.It was crucial for me that the U.S. beat Venezuela because I didn't want them to have to play against Canada again. I got a really bad vibe about Canada, whom I consider to be our most dedicated adversaries. You have to be personally acquainted with Canadians to understand the depth of their resentment toward us. They look like us, talk like us but they really don't like us. It's like the pod people in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". This might seem shocking to say, but in terms of this tournament the U.S. can expect better relations with Venezuela or Cuba than with Canada. When I saw the faces of the Canadian players after their loss to the U.S., I realized that this is more than just about baseball. I have seen that look before, and it's not good.Without knowing anything, I am willing to bet that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez promised his players some serious coin if they won the World Baseball Classic. Since most of their starting lineup is already drawing MLB money (four of them play for the Tigers alone), he must have promised them real money, probably around a million bucks each.The Venezuelan players are a serious threat, but after six close innings their pitching ran out of steam and Team USA romped over them 16-6. The U.S. now proceeds to the second round in Miami, where it will go up against the formidable Puerto Rican and Dominican machines. That is going to be serious baseball.
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Posted on 3/9/2009
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March 08, 2009
I felt real bad when I saw the dejected expressions on the face of the Canadian baseball players and fans at Toronto Stadium last night. Real bad. After all, they had just gotten the yellow snow stomped out of them.Look at it this way: they got hockey, but USA owns the rest of the world.Three years ago we sent our team against Canada in the first World Baseball Classic for what we thought was going to be a nice, friendly little game between neighbors. We didn't realize how bad they wanted to stomp us.Canada has got a lot of good players, but everything they know they learned from us. We took those boys in when they were raw, like little orphans, and taught them everything they know. And how do they pay us back? By trying to stab us in the back.
Anyway, we learned our lesson: no more mister nice guy. As former president George Bush once put it, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I'm an idiot."Some times, when a person is so overwhelmingly superior, like the USA is at baseball, which we invented and we completely dominate, that person has a tendency to let his guard down, especially whan he is playing a second-rate team like Team Canada. When you don't respect your opponent and you don't give your best effort, you can get defeated by a midget or a retard who is focused on winning. That is what happened against Team Canada in 2006.This time we were ready for all of Canada's sleazy tricks, like spreading maple syrup on the jogging track so our outfielders would slip and slide, and sending out a giant pea soup Frenchman to pitch pancakes to us. No Frenchman can throw a baseball, OK? Their hands are not suitably shaped for baseball. That's why the Montreal Expos collapsed - frog hands.Never mind that. We know they're jealous of us. We're down here in the sunshine, surfing and swimming, while they're freezing their Canuck arses off in a giant walk-in freezer. Their money looks like a rack of freakin Valentines cards. The only good thing they got is beer, which is a good thing so that they have something to cry in after we kick their butts at baseball.Anyway, Canada doesn't own hockey either. The Russians do. Unlike Canada, the Russians are not a soft touch. They are hard cases. One time, when Russia was under communism but was still kicking Canada's butt at hockey, the Canadians complained that the Russians were sending their best hockey players, who they were calling amateurs, while Canada's best players were ineligible because they were technically professionals.The Russians said, "Send anybody you want".This time the Canadian sent their best NHL talent. They said, "Now we are going to show those commies who's boss".Guess what? Canada collapsed. They always collapse. In the whole history of the Olympics Canada has won about two medals. They're soft. Their best boxer, Arturo Gatti, was an Italian. They have football, but their biggest stars are American rejects, and they have to restrict the number of Americans each team can sign, or we would take that over completely as well.The only sport Canadians are only good at is curling, which is like shuffleboard, but they take brooms and sweep the ice (don't ask me why). That's the only thing Canadians are good at, pushing a broom, except they keep falling through the ice because they're so fat.Don't get me wrong. I like Canadians. They got money (at least once they convert that weird confetti into real dollars). I want them to keep coming down to the U.S. and spending their money. Better still, why don't they just stay home and send us their money through the mail?
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Posted on 3/8/2009
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March 06, 2009
WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC: South Korea 9 – Chinese Taipei 0
“The Taipei Massacre”“The Taipei Massacre”: I’m not talkin’ about a World War II battle. I’m talkin’ about a game at The Tokyo Dome.This was the baseball equivalent of setting a platter of barbecue ribs in front of a pack of hungry hounds. Koreans are physically huge and tough – in the six feet, 200 lbs. - plus range. They are baseball maniacs. Compared to them the Chinese Taipei players looked like a group of willowy bamboo stalks by the bubbling brook.Things immediately broke badly for Taipei in the top of the first inning, when their lead pitcher walked the first three Korean batters and then served up a homerun pitch to the clean-up man, who knocked it into the Sea of Japan for a 4-0 lead with no outs.Amazingly, the Chinese Taipei manager let the kid stay in the game, whereupon he immediately gave up two more runs for a six run first inning. How this pitcher is going to live this down back in his country, I don’t know.Later on, the Koreans scored three more runs, as the Chinese dugout sat there, stone-faced, looking like those life-sized terracotta battle statues unearthed at the 2,000 year-old tomb of the Emperor Chi’a. Fortunately, the game was played in Japan, so the whole team can commit hara-kiri if it wants to.But first Chinese Taipei has to play an elimination game against the loser of yesterday’s matchup with Japan – Red China! - a game which betting touts and international baseball analysts are already referring to as: THE CHINESE CIVIL WAR!!!!!
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Posted on 3/6/2009
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March 06, 2009
Not too many years ago the idea of watching Red China play baseball against Japan by satellite in real time would have seemed like science fiction. A lot of sports writers would have loved to live to see this day.The shocker was how seamlessly and technically perfect the Chinese team played. Directed by American manager Terry Collins, these superb athletes have mastered all the fundamentals of the game. As the game progressed the Chinese defensive fielding, throwing and running skills were evident, though their pitching and hitting fell woefully short of matching Japan’s powerhouse machine. Particularly notable was the Chinese shortstop, Ray Chang, an American of Chinese parentage who besides being a player is also a trainer on the Chinese coaching staff. Chang, who plays in the Pirates farm system, stood out for his fielding talent, catching a Japanese runner at home plate and another at third for two particularly notable plays as well as setting up some other outstanding infield action.When you consider the comedic aspect that inevitably must have occurred in teaching baseball to a group of athletes coming from a country of 1.3 billion people where 99.9% of the inhabitants wouldn’t know a baseball from a pineapple chicken, the magnitude of the achievement of fielding such a fine team is all the more powerful. China has the notable achievement of having beat the renowned Taiwan team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and came close to beating an overwhelming favorite, South Korea, at the first World Baseball Classic in 2006.As with any international sports tournament involving professional players, there are bound to be distortions and contradictions involving the interests of team owners and international politics. Neither Japan nor the U.S. will be fielding their best teams because of the concerns of owners, who are concerned about degrading their resources in advance of the regular season. The perils of power politics are also painfully apparent. Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez complained loudly that American team owners were discouraging players of his country’s nationality from participating under its colors. Add to this the fact that many players are having a problem determining which country they should represent. Guys like Mike Piazza, who played for the Italian team in 2006 despite not knowing the difference between dolce and vita, or Americans with names that they didn’t even know to be Dutch who have been enticed into playing on the Netherlands team are just two hilarious examples. The terrorist attack in Pakistan this week on the Sri Lankan cricket team, where eight Pakistani security personnel were murdered in a bomb attack and machine gun fusillade by Muslim extremists, only adds to the sinister uncertainty of sending athletes out into a perilous international environment.Nevertheless, the game of baseball is bigger than the narrow parochial interests of any one country. The ballistic grace and poetic drama of the sport elevates it to the level of world culture as it brings so many elements of tension and suspense into play. The graceful arc of a sidearm slider pitch as it changes course in mid-flight to cross over the outside corner of the plate, deceiving the batter’s senses; the crack of a 95 mph fastball when it meets the thick end of the bat; the graceful leap of a second basement avoiding collision with the runner even as he dispatches a minutely calibrated throw to first base to achieve the double play; the nerve-wracking game of cat-and-mouse played between the pitcher, catcher, basemen and runner in an attempted steal – these are the elements eclipsing any other sport in the world, and bringing tears of joy to the eyes of the afecionado.I desperately want the USA to always win all the time out of love for all the happiness the game has given me during my entire life, but that emotion is conflicted by the thrill of seeing the game incrementally spread around the globe. If having to share the glory with other, equally deserving foreign races is the price Americans must pay for sharing the ultimate expression of our inestimable genius, then that is a small price to pay.There are no fans in the world more partisan and enthusiastic than those of the Tokyo Dome. The racket emanating from the place, accompanied by a trumpet and drum band of dedicated devotees aroused the senses even as the drama unfolded on the playing field. Ti Yu Darvish, a slender six-foot pitcher whom the announcers delighted in comparing to Randy Johnson, led off for Team Japan. Half-Iranian and half-Japanese whose parents met while they were students in the United States, Darvish is an example of how far baseball has progressed from its provincial origins. Darvish had a whole repertory of outstanding stuff, keeping the Chinese hitless throughout his four-inning tenure on the mound, during which he presided over 3 of Japan’s 4 runs. He was followed in succession by a battery of Japanese major league starters who had been drafted as relievers for this series, and who so thoroughly dominated China as to really turn the game into a yawner for any but the most appreciative fan who, like this writer, was entranced at the technical perfection that had been brought to bear by the Chinese team.The Chinese have yet to master some of the nuances of the game, as when they mishandled a squeeze play at home plate and inadvertently set themselves up to concede a run to Japan in the following play. Chinese pitcher Guogiang sent a Japanese home when he tried to pick off a runner at first while forgetting to lift his foot off the rubber, committing a balk. These are unforgivable faults owing to a lack of hard experience.Chinese hitting was also almost non-existent. They got some hits, but these guys are too slight to marshal the power necessary to slam the long ball. Say what you want about A-Rod or Barry Bonds, but when you take away all that muscle from the game it eliminates a team’s power and hobbles it offensively. Growth enhancement or no, the Chinese team needs to hit the weight room in order to give itself the emphatic power necessary to dispatch the long ball and win games.You don’t have to be a genius to pick winners for the first round, so since I’m not a genius, here are my picks:South Korea over Taiwan
Cuba murders South Africa (South Africa???)
Mexico murders Australia
U.S. murders Canada
Venezuela over Italy
DR over Netherlands
Puerto Rico over PanamaLET’S PLAY BALL!!
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Posted on 3/6/2009
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March 03, 2009
Barack Obama is a man (and I do not denote the term loosely) of astounding physical courage to appear in public without multiple layers of body armor, considering the rabid, hysterical nature of the reactionary forces arrayed against him.In this he would do well to absorb the lessons learned by Hillary Clinton, who knows a thing or two about dodging sniper fire from her experiences in the Bosnian war.Nobody should underestimate the dangers to his physical safety as the Republicans, aroused in one last death gasp of desperation, like the final scene of an "Aliens" movie, attempt to claw themselves back to power in a Hitlerite rage of fury and destruction.I would also fear for the safety of Biden, Pelosi and Reid, who are also the designated victims of vindictive Republican fury. The Republicans, rotting corpses of stinking, vile putrescence, who have driven the entire world to the brink of insanity by their hellsome, fiendish practices, perfectly exemplified by the obese, obscene Rush Limbaugh and the filthy, diseased sanitary napkin that goes by the name of Ann Coulter, have declared war on Obama and, by extension, against the world's population.As we struggle to keep from drowning in a sea of ignorance and corruption, the Republicans have vowed to continue the fight to drown us in the cesspool of vile putrescence that they have created.All Hail Barack Obama and the Clintons, who were sent to us by Providence, the same way you might throw a life preserver to a drowning man. The Democratic Party deserves all our protection and affection, as it is our only defense against perishing in the abyss of oblivion.
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Posted on 3/3/2009
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