Christie goes national -- where no one knows him

RNC keynote speaker Chris Christie of New Jersey is not only a huge windbag from the Jersey shore, he’s also a total phony. If hypocrisy were measured in BMI, he’s be breaking the scales.

As demonstrated last night in his prime-time blusterfest, Christie loves to show off his tough-guy attitudes toward government spending, especially when dealing with dangerous public enemies like schoolteachers. He also wrecked the plans for a new Hudson River tunnel that could have alleviated the congestion that plagues his suburban commuters’ lives.

But when it comes to dishing out tax money to wealthy developers for tacky eyesores like the Meadowlands shopping center (once called Xanadu, now named American Dream@Meadowlands--oh, stop!), Christie suddenly becomes a soft touch. This should surprise us exactly how?

New Jersey has already spent $1 billion on this white elephant, and Christie eagerly ponied up another $200 million while posturing as Tony Soprano shaking down Miss Cartwright for her pension in front of a roomful of first-graders.

The American Dream project will benefit the Canada-based Ghermazian family and will feature an indoor ski slope—surely just what New Jerseyites need to take their minds off facing retirement on a diet of cat food.

It should also come as no surprise that Christie supported the tunnel project while running for governor before smashing it once he got into office. (His opponent was Wall Street crook Jon Corzine.) But commuters sitting in their cars all those extra hours might not take kindly to a second term for the fat guy, so it’s a smart move to start building his campaign for 2016 at Romney’s expense. Hey, it’s all about climbing up the weakest guy’s face on your way to the top.

So shoot me

“They sit and they pontificate and they complain, but they don’t do anything”.

That’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg ragging on the American Civil Liberties Union after the New York chapter sued the city’s cops over ‘stop-and-frisk’ (the program that permits police to harass black and Latino males with impunity). It’s a pity no one took the time to parse this peculiar outburst or ask the mayor what he was expecting the ACLU to do instead of exercising oversight of those who wield deadly force. Join neighborhood watch patrols? Form vigilante squads? Sew super-hero outfits and wear them to parades? The ACLU doesn’t want to replace the police force, but it does think policing can and should be done without violating the Constitution—what an odd notion.

Bloomberg was contrasting the ACLU’s annoying criticism with the brave actions of our rough-and-ready police force, which has distinguished itself this week in two shooting incidents. Unfortunately, the danger to the public in both cases may have been multiplied by the NYPD’s eager use of the collective trigger finger. The mayor is certainly right in these cases: when it comes to guys roaming the streets with weapons, our cops cannot be accused of idleness. When something happens, they sure don’t just sit back and pontificate; they take out their guns and fire away.

The famous case is, of course, the Empire State Building shooting in which a disgruntled ex-employee went up to his former boss and whacked him right in the street. According to reports, the police were alerted to the perpetrator, followed him and mowed him down when he drew his gun on them. Nine bystanders were injured by police bullets or shrapnel.

No one in his right mind would expect the cops to let this guy continue on his deadly rampage. But the fact that no one was killed or paralyzed by the NYPD fusillade was a lucky accident. It would be interesting to see a detailed report on how the officers reacted on the scene and whether all that shooting was needed. But with Bloomberg’s mentality dominating our terror-obsessed city, even raising the question will be denounced as disloyal meddling. The next group of bystanders may not be so lucky.

The other shooting incident was the Aug. 11 felling of a mentally deranged man waving a knife around in Times Square. Clearly, public safety was threatened. Then again, was it enhanced by a phalanx of officers firing 12 bullets into the guy? Maybe so, but it would be nice to have some cool-headed, external auditors looking at these two incidents and getting an unemotional hearing from the city fathers and the top cops.

That’s not likely, however, because Bloomberg also likes to say that he and the cops ‘have to get it right 100 percent of the time’. By that, he means that no violent plots can be allowed to hatch, even if it means a few innocent people get the short end, their mosques snooped at, their telephones tapped, their kids patted down and sometimes (accidentally!) killed. He also means—and says—that his critics are whiny jerks who don’t know the score. So don’t expect questions about how and when the cops decide to shoot.

Dear "Ms. Reid"

Ms. Nordia Reid, Customer Service Representative
ACS
P.O. Box 7051
Utica NY 13504

Dear Ms. Reid:

Thank you for your recent reply to my query. Although I’m not sure ‘thank you’ makes much sense when addressing a computer. You see, ‘Ms. Reid’, I know ‘you’ are not a person at all but a pre-programmed answering system. Since ‘you’ are really just a series of electronic impulses zipping around the insides of a server somewhere, it is a bit creepy to add ‘thank you’ for an act that had no more consciousness of itself than a stone rolling down a cliff—perhaps less. But I am Old School and tend to say ‘thank you’ for minor cordialities even when not really merited. By the way, ‘No problem!’ is not really a proper reply despite what these perky youngsters all say nowadays. I hope you’ve been programmed to say ‘You’re welcome’, it’s much nicer.

Now, how is it that I know ‘you’ are not real? It’s quite simple, really, and I’d like to explain. I wrote to your creator’s parent company, ACS, which as you ‘know’ (in a manner of speaking, that is to say, it’s in your database) is an educational loan servicer charged with collecting college loan repayments and reaping a fairly handsome, government-subsidized reward for doing so. That s probably already too much information for ‘you’ given your limitations!

Anyway, I took this step because it was impossible to use your sister service, the online go-to-for-everything account management system, even though I have been making my loan payments on time for six years. That’s because it refuses to recognize me unless I answer a series of personal identification questions, including a telephone number that I got rid of in 2005. Since I am not the Harry Houdini of memory, I no longer know this magic code and thus do not exist for the ACS Web site. That is, ‘you’ in one of your alternative avatars.

Oh well! I don’t mind writing an old-fashioned letter. (Forgive me for ‘bothering’ you with all these details, even though I know you are incapable of being ‘bothered’—only electro-magnetically altered. But I digress.) So I wrote one asking for some help in establishing my existence within the ACS universe. Please recognize me! I said. It was a bit like the lament of Pinocchio—I am a real boy! with a touch of whimsy and pathos. Only my nose didn’t grow because I don’t tell lies and furthermore, I pay my bills on time, which Pinocchio did not, being a piece of wood. (‘You’ can certainly relate.) Nonetheless this fact ‘you’ already ‘know’, not in any human sense, of course, just that it’s a fact embedded somewhere in there among all your 1s and 0s.

So now I’m coming to the point—please bear with me patiently (even though I know you don’t have a concept of ‘impatience’, that would be silly. I can leave my home computer on all night, and it immediately responds when I hit the keyboard at 6 a.m. Imagine treating a friend like that! They’d drop you in a minute.) So in response to my simple request, ‘you’ (not Ms. Reid who, if she exists, I’m sure would be more alert) wrote to say the following:

Thank you for your recent letter notifying us of the discrepancy in payments applied to your student loan account.

‘You’ then go on to ask for photocopies of checks, and ‘you’ kindly offered to attend to my difficulties by telephone. That was very kind of ‘you’! Except for the problem that whenever I attempt to call ACS, your sister telephone screening system just won’t let go of that 2005 telephone number and blocks my access. Which is why I wrote ‘you’ that letter in the first place. It’s all rather circular, don’t ‘you’ ‘think’?

Please note (not that ‘you’ can really ‘note’ anything, being a collection of wires and microchips sitting under a desk in Utica or Bledsoe, Kentucky) that I did not at any time say the first thing about a payment discrepancy. ‘You’ made that up! ‘You’ little devil! I guess that’s what happens when ‘you’ take over the chores that poor old Ms. Reid can’t see to—things just get all mixed up. I completely understand—being a human being with a rational faculty, I know exactly how that happens. Trust me, I have made some mistakes in my life as well. (I know that ‘trust’ is probably a pretty remote concept for ‘you’ too, but let’s just say, ‘Correct input, verified data’ for simplicity’s sake, and leave it at that.)

However, since ‘you’ are not really in the same category, ‘you’ really can’t do much about this little mix-up ‘you’ have been sent out to handle. ‘Don’t send a boy to do a man’s job’, my grandmother used to say, which in this case could be amended as, ‘Don’t entrust your correspondence to an inanimate object’. Things are likely to go wrong if ‘you’ do! As they did here right before our eyes. So Grandma was right, as usual.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m even writing ‘you’ about all this in the first place. Somehow, I suspected that someone like ‘you’ would be charged with responding to my letter and that ‘you’ wouldn’t really be up to it. So I returned to my old college alumni office and tracked down a special telephone number that the loan officers had, through which I finally managed to get a human voice on the telephone. At least I think it was a human voice—she was quite convincing. My accounts are in order, and if things continue to go well for me, I’ll be paying off this loan faster than ‘you’ can say ‘Bob’s ‘your’ uncle’ so that the money spent by the government to pay ‘you’ for my servicing needs can be put to some socially beneficial use. I’m sorry, ‘Ms. Reid’—it’s really wasted on ‘you’.

Don’t take it personally!

Sincerely ‘yours’,

Timothy Frasca

Truth from Gumballs

An army of spinmeisters will not hold off the flaming ball of shit hurtling toward the execrable and now notorious Todd Akin, the bozo from Missouri who thinks all that rape talk is exaggerated. To call him a douchebag would be an insult to douchebags, which are far more useful to the human race than he is.

But the fantasy that if a woman is experiencing sufficient terror during the act she will somehow produce abortifacient hormones is not a new idea. In fact, I’m surprised Akin and his Bible-thumper friends haven’t already criminalized it. I mean, if removing the possibly fertilized egg is murder, shouldn’t a woman be prosecuted for permitting herself to be that scared? Doesn’t the Sacredness of Life dictate that she should smile broadly and welcome the precious seed into the world? How dare she murder an unborn child by succumbing to a silly fear of being strangled or cut to pieces?

The scramble to dump this loony-tunes candidate quicker than he can say, Jesus Loves You, is a sure sign that the anti-sex crowd wants this one to go away yesterday if not sooner. But it won’t be so easy to disentangle the underlying Republican/Christian Right posture on birth control and abortion from this embarrassingly revealing Akin-boner.

Turns out Righteous Mike Huckabee, the last Christian standing in 2008, has his own record of endorsing the prophylactic qualities of women’s fear. Ezra Klein notes that as governor Huckabee appointed an Akin clone to be the head of Arkansas’ health department who believed that ‘fear-induced hormonal changes could block a rape victim’s ability to conceive.’

Akin’s outrage isn’t really that much of a stretch if you believe god’s finger is on the fertilized egg the instant it begins to roam inside the female body, even before attaching to the uterine wall or achieving the most incipient viability. With that as your starting point, actual women are reduced to slightly inconvenient holding tanks for the propagation of the species, which is not a terribly popular notion outside of places like Saudi Arabia and Mississippi.

It’s going to be comparatively easy for the wackos to muddy the waters on the Medicare-Obamacare debate. But this one is a losing battle because people not living under purdah are alert to this issue and its subtexts. The GOP poobahs want Akin and his mega-gaffe to go away ASAP.

Todd Palin at least has a reality show to occupy his idle moments; the Missouri Todd might want to ask him if there’s a free slot. The guy is going to have time on his hands.

' [not] sorry to bother you’

Okay, here’s the latest assault on civilization dreamed up by the bipeds of the non-profit world, to my deep chagrin as many of the guilty perform worthy tasks. But I have had it with the chirpy youth wearing aerobic smiles who now accost one all over the streets of Manhattan, clipboard in hand, to ask if we can ‘talk’ about the great work of Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, Public Citizen, or DoGooders International, Inc.

News flash: this is glorified panhandling. It is also a plague.

Upon taking the subway this afternoon, I was hit up by an obvious drunk with a red face who started off by complimenting my hat and telling me what a cool guy I was. Then he wanted to know if he could ‘ask me a question’, which we all know means, Can you give me a dollar? When I said I was in a hurry, he began to curse me as a rude asshole and threw in a few references to my poor old late mom, to boot.

How exactly is this different from the requests to ‘talk’ from all these aggressive hustlers representing the professional world-saver brigades? Okay, they don’t have anything to say about my ancestors, and supposedly it’s not for their pockets or their bar bills. But then again, they’re not out there for their health. Are they hired by these organizations for ‘summer internships’ and then sent out to drum up cash? Do they get a percentage or minimum wage?

I don’t like begging and hustling in any of its multitudinous forms and respectfully submit that the public byways should be maintained, to the extent possible, free of it. I would and often do gladly contribute generous sums to organizations that provide, or at least seem to provide, real services for people in need. Yes, yes, we do not live in a truly humane polity, and people fall between the cracks. Point taken; therefore, what? We should have strangers’ hands in our pockets every time we go out the door? We should smile graciously at the supermarket and the big-box stores when their drones ask us to put in an extra dollar for their favorite charity?

I recognize that begging is as old as humanity and that people are sometimes in a tight spot. New Yorkers are fairly generous by nature and will help people out when they can. But it can be managed. I work right down the street from one of the city’s largest homeless shelters, and the men there are strictly enjoined not to harass passers by. I think it dignifies them not to feel they must rub the sleep from their eyes and then hit the sidewalks to cadge quarters from people doing better than themselves. No doubt some of them panhandle elsewhere, but for at least a part of their day, they are just guys getting by with the same right to the sidewalk as the rest of us.

Meanwhile, these prosperous nonprofits (the latest one I was hustled by in Chelsea was the gay-rights Human Rights Campaign, which owns an entire huge building in D.C. for its lobbying) can do us all a big favor and at least leave the panhandling to guys wanting a few coins, a cigarette or a bottle of Thunderbird. They don’t need the competition.

Oo, Ahh, Skeery Mr Ryan

We now have a presidential ticket openly advocating the end of the social contract that has held the country together for 80 years. Is it condemned to death no matter who wins?

Mr. Ryan has cooked up a bunch of ideas so inane and internally contradictory that his ascension to the vice presidential nomination could only be possible with the assistance of a willfully blind, i.e. deeply complicit, media echo chamber. As Dean Baker has pointed out for years, the Washington Post, once a reliably liberalish establishment newspaper, regularly pours the Ryan Kool-Aid on budgetary matters and the supposed ‘crisis of entitlements’. He patiently corrects the falsehoods by noting, first, that Social Security, an insurance pool, is comfortably solvent and could easily be strengthened to handle retiring boomers with a modest tax increase on higher earners.

He also repeats almost daily—although few listen—that the crushing increase of Medicare/Medicaid spending requires major surgery on health costs that no one in government is even suggesting as it would entail a challenge to powerful pharmaceutical interests and the earnings of medical professionals. None of our current ‘leaders’ would whisper such things even in private. So the Beltway consensus that ‘something must be done’ is nearly unanimous, and Paul Ryan is merely the extreme and openly heartless version of it.

There are signs that the wagons are circling to bring Obama and his team back for another cycle, and one can take brief comfort in the idea that the country is not yet ready to stand before the cameras and to throw Grandma down the stairs in her wheelchair. But just because despicable acts cannot be performed in public does not mean that they cannot be performed. The Romney-Ryan train may indeed crash—‘Enjoy Tasty Catfood & Make Me Rich!’ is not really a great advertising slogan—but then what?

If past behavior is a good predictor of future action, a second Obama term should give us pause. Is there a single piece of evidence, not counting frothy campaign promises, that he will dig in the presidential heels and defend the social programs that Ryan wants on the chopping block? I see none. We will hear a lot in the next three months about the hallowed commitments to our aged and infirm, dating from Franklin & Eleanor, just as we heard four years ago about torture, indefinite detention and illegal warmaking.

How did all that work out? Obama has neutralized Republican attacks on his foreign policy by largely adopting theirs. No one calls it a ‘Grand Bargain’, the term Beltway hacks like to use when contemplating how to dismantle guaranteed state pensions and free health care for the elderly. But that’s what it is, a slightly toned-down version of the Bush-era war-on-terror strategies, including drone missile attacks and authorized assassination lists. As a chilling article by Tom Junod in the latest Esquire points out, Obama gets plenty more elbow room to carry out these policies because he’s successfully painted himself as a decent, even agonized, guy doing his best. And since he’s black, he’s on the side of the underdog, right?

Who’s to say that a similar dynamic will not emerge post-November when the howling wolves, despite photo-shopping bones through the president’s nose, will retreat to their forest lairs licking their self-inflicted wounds? Obama, if history is a reliable precedent, will then extend the olive branch and ask them to come play nice so that they can carve up our future together hand in hand. And after the relief many will feel that two disgustingly rich and selfish creeps are not in the White House, Mr O will have plenty of room in which to do it.

Food fight among the 5 families

There is a fascinating case roiling the financial pages involving a bank called Standard Chartered and its willful and highly lucrative violations of the sanctions imposed on Iran. The sanctions themselves are part of our next nefarious, undeclared war against a non-enemy, but they are the law of the land. Therefore, helping the Iranian regime get around them is, like laundering drug money, highly profitable.

As we have seen repeatedly, Geithner and Obama are indifferent to banking crimes, but at the same time the entire political class is also fanatically committed to making the Israelis happy in all things. So here is where two immovable forces hurtle down the train tracks at each other: bank crooks defrauding the system (great, where’s my cut?) v/s bank crooks defrauding the system by helping Israel’s enemies (how dare you? pillory them! hang them in the public square! etc.)

The twist is that the regulatory action against SCB was issued by a tiny player, the New York State Department of Financial Services, not the Federal Reserve or any of the other big oversight agencies. That’s because those agencies are completely captured by the industry and intimidated by Congress, which in turn is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the banks themselves, as confirmed by Senator Durbin years ago in an imprudently frank moment three years ago.

And the threat issued by the DFS head Benjamin Lawsky is enough to focus the mind of any bank exec: to revoke the bank’s license to operate in New York State, which would be The End. The bank’s stock promptly cratered, and subtly phrased howls of outrage immediately began to issue from the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, wherein banks are not to be expected to hew to any silly laws or things in their pursuit of lovely piles of cash.

But the complaint shows that Lawsky has the goods on this bank, not in a narrow, legal sense as the pro-bank propaganda machine is now spinning it, but in their internal e-mails displaying explicit attempts to hide the illegal activities. These included stripping the Iranian parties out of wire transfer cables so that the final beneficiaries remained invisible. Deloitte & Touche, their TBTF auditors, also played along.

In an honest financial system (especially one in which corporations are people), those responsible for these actions would be looking at lengthy prison terms rather than a slap on the wrist, a miniscule fine and a couple of weeks of head-hanging and phony repentance. Lawsky would never be able to resist the vast pressure from Obama on down to back off from his regulatory function and let the big boys get away with it.

But given that it involves helping Iran avoid economic pain (and not merely ripping off poor people), the bankster mob has a problem with this one. Even Wall Street-friendly pols like Schumer may not be willing to go to the wall for crooks who undermine Israeli foreign policy goals. And presidentially ambitious governor Andrew Cuomo, who in theory could undermine his appointee Lawsky, gains nothing by looking like yet another Blue Dog Democrat indistiguishable from the country club Republicans. (First you legalize gay marriage and get elected as a progressive surrounded by hordes of adoring youth and only then you emerge as the next defender of the 1%.)

Whether or not this turns into a real defeat for our financial overlords, it is a good indicator of where the battles will be drawn, i.e. not between the 1-percenter bosses and the rest of us, but among sectors of the 1 percent whose interests diverge. Will illicit money-scouring trump zionism this time around, or has SCB gone too far? Stay tuned.