Bob Crespo

No one can explain love, or why anybody loves anyone or anything. Which is fine. Why ruin a beautiful thing with some dry scholarly explanation?

So, Bernie Madoff gets the max, 150 years in jail and forfeiture of every penny he has, and then some. He was ordered by the judge to cough up $171 billion smackeroos in restitution, a sum even Bill Gates can’t cover. Everybody knows the thousands of victims of his Ponzi scheme will never recover anything but pennies on the dollar and that Bernie won’t live for all that much of his sentence, what with him being in his 70’s and all, but the judge felt that a message had to be sent. Not the message that people with tens of millions of dollars to invest definitely know better than to hand their dough to a guy promising gangster loan shark interest rate numbers as a return on their investments and when they do so they are knowingly aiding and abetting a crime.

No, no that message. The message is; don’t mess with rich people’s dough! That’s why bank robbers get sentenced to 30 years while those who rob grocery stores get maybe 8 or 10 years, tops, as long as no bloodshed is involved. While Bernie Madoff wasn’t at all violent and even had the enthusiastic cooperation of a great many of his victims, he chose to rip off the very wealthy. None of them will be prosecuted for knowingly investing in a pyramid scheme. They will suffer a horrible fate nonetheless: most of them will be just regular rich instead of fabulously rich. One lady even looked for sympathy because she had to sell her $48,000 fur coat. Get out the hankies and violins.

Take his lovely wife Ruth Madoff, for example. She just cut a deal with prosecutors allowing her to keep “only” $2.5 million dollars. Most of the world (my hand is raised, thank you) would jump at that deal, but Mrs. Madoff acts like she has been sentenced to live in a corrugated tin shack with no plumbing and eat cold gruel for the rest of her life. Not exactly. While she won’t be living in a Manhattan penthouse worth tens of millions of dollars anymore, getting two and a half million won’t exactly place her in the position of having to get on line at the next government cheese handout. Even putting that dough in the bank at the paltry interest rate of 2 and a quarter percent would yield her an annual income of $62,500 before taxes, well above the national average. Add her social security to that and she’ll be just fine; well fed, properly housed, medically insured and quite comfortable. No tragedy there.

The tragedy is the non-fabulously wealthy people Madoff ripped off, honest workers who scrimped and saved and trusted their nest egg to a thief and are now near destitute as they face old age. Then there’s the people who trusted other financial planners with their fortunes, people you expect to actively manage your money prudently and not hand it over to a guy they had to know was running a scam. Are any of these finance professionals facing criminal charges, or at the very least industry sanctions for abandoning their responsibilities to their clients for a fast buck? While many of them are being sued for malfeasance and corruption or scamming or whatever the legal term is for stealing a whole lot of money as opposed to stealing a more modest amount, so far prosecutors are acting like they cracked the case completely with the sentencing of Madoff.

But who knows? Maybe the District Attorney’s office has more indictments up its sleeve. It’s hard to believe that Madoff pulled this off with no accomplices other than his greedy rich clients trying to earn double the going rate on their money. There had to be a lot of high ranking people in his office who were in on the scam. What about his secretary? Secretaries know everything about the businesses where they work. You’d hate to see a low paid working stiff go to jail, but what if that low paid working stiff aided and abetted a huge crime? Then there would be the other executives in Madoff’s firm, really rich guys like himself who may or may not be claiming they were as surprised as the rest of the world that the company they helped run was a neatly wrapped box of air. The DA is playing followup indictments and charges close to the vest.

But the bottom line is that the rich really, really hate giving up any of their dough. Every dollar they spend makes them a dollar less rich. That’s the mindset that led Wall Street to become an entire culture of Bernie Madoffs, as greedy and unscrupulous a bunch of louts as Ebenezer Scrooge. They ruined the good names and the very existence of respected companies that had been doing honest business for many decades, some of them for over a century. These were companies and individuals who made great fortunes playing it straight, following the rules and reaping the rewards of being at the highest levels of the one of the most rewarding businesses on earth.

All they were asked to do was not fuck it up. This was the golden goose that would provide them and their descendants with fabulous livings forever. Just don’t fuck it up! Not a lot to ask. But greed is a powerful force, one all human beings have to one degree or another, even though we know it’s wrong. Half the laws we have on the books are aimed at curbing greed. “Thou shalt not steal” is a prominent early example. But in recent years, beginning with Ronald Reagan de-clawing the regulatory agencies overseeing the people who handle everybody’s money, greed became fashionable. Fast forward twenty two years to Bush the Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney getting elected, and they ratcheted up greed to official government policy.

They actively gutted the financial regulatory agencies by underfunding them and not hiring replacement personnel when people retired. Then they implemented the most massive peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy in human history in the form of tax cuts. It got to the point of having less than 1% of the population owning the majority of the nation’s wealth. Then of course it all blew up in everybody’s face and the government was forced to bail out these greedy pricks to the tune of trillions of tax dollars, which they then proceeded to blow on hookers and Picassos until a few of them got their asses fired.

And the rest of them still don’t really get it, they just toe the line to avoid jail. Neither does Madoff get it, who thought 12 years in the slammer and a hundred dollar fine sounded okay to him. The judge disagreed and gave him 150 years, only because he wasn’t allowed to give him a thousand. Bernie needs some company in the form of Wall Street felons in prison, his fellow greed heads, people who were in essence handed America on a silver platter and asked only that they not fuck it up. They weren’t handed a seedy currency exchange booth in an open air bazaar in some desert nation, but the gleaming towers of Wall street, private jets, mansions, exotic vacation homes and trophy wives. They were modern day princes and nicknamed themselves “Masters of The Universe.”

And yet this was not enough. They wanted Bill Gates money, all of  them, even though they had invented nothing, and they lied, cheated and stole to make it happen, very nearly taking the entire country down with them when their house of cards collapsed. Mr. Madoff was merely the most audacious and conspicuous of the thieves. And just maybe Madoff did the country a favor for being so public a greedy asshole. The credit card companies and banks have been quietly ripping off poor and working class people for decades with usurious rates and hidden fees, but Bernie mostly targeted the very wealthy, and when you go after rich people’s money, the shit hits the fan big time. The whole world watched this tawdry saga unfold. And now Madoff gets the max, waiting for some his colleagues to join him.

Maybe they can form a new prison gang, selling cigarettes, drugs and shivs to their fellow inmates at outrageously high prices. Call themselves the Ex-Billionaires or  Masters of The Universe or something catchy like that. That will probably go over with the tattooed and muscular lifers about as well as a 3 day lock down and before long these bankers and CEOs will be doing the laundry and cleaning the cells of guys named Big Jamal, One-Eyed Freddy and Vinny The Neck. Then perhaps the rest of the financial services community will get it though their heads that greed isn’t good.

Maybe they’ll figure they’ll just have to eke out a living somehow on their million dollar salaries and pay their taxes like everyone else. It’s either that or One Eyed Freddy. From a lot of us who have a hard time working up any hatred for a guy who never did anything to us since we didn’t have enough dough for him to steal, thanks Bernie! You’ve done your nation a service. In a pretty shitty way, but a service just the same. You’ve brought the world’s attention to the biggest ring of thieves that ever lived. Let’s make Bernie just the first of many members of the Ex-Billionaires prison gang.

If you are an idiot, don’t complain about other idiots. With any luck, they’re even dopier than you and you’re the one who comes up smelling like a rose.

Boy, you thought that liberals where whiners? Compared to the disgraced and disenfranchised Neo-Cons, they’re a bunch of tight-lipped stoics. Who would have thought these tough talking bullies would turn into schoolgirls the minute they were out of power? Well, pretty much anyone who’s familiar with bullies, that’s who. War mongers who feared to wear a uniform themselves when they were of age never did have any credibility, all they had was power. And they exercised that power without heed to any Constitutional constraints, perhaps figuring that document to be too liberal for their liking. They decided to invade Iraq for what they fully knew were false reasons, causing death and destruction and costing America almost 5,000 of our sons’ and daughters’ lives while many thousands more were grievously wounded.

They used the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as a political tool to limit the rights and freedoms of American citizens, viewing that devastating attack as a political opportunity to solidify their own power through fear mongering and dictatorship-style crackdowns. They implemented the torture of prisoners of war in violation of a treaty that America signed, The Geneva Convention, not caring a bit that it was wrong, unconstitutional and, just as importantly, that it exposed our own soldiers to torture in the event of their capture. They didn’t care because they were tough guys! Or at least tough guys on the asses of others, a pretty easy stance to take when your own personal comfort is never in jeopardy.

These people also oversaw the greatest peaceful transfer of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy in human history, seeking to roll back the social progress America began to make in the 1930s. The vast majority of America’s wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a small minority under the watch of the Neo-Cons and their undisguised contempt for the poor and the working classes was most evident during Hurricane Katrina, when they let New Orleans and wide swaths of the Gulf Coast drown while they patted each other on the back.

They never did hunt down the guy who attacked America, Osama bin Laden, because it proved to be difficult, or at any rate a lot more difficult than invading Iraq, hanging their leader and stealing their oil. Besides, capturing bin Laden would deprive them of their Bogeyman, and his successful video career was their greatest asset when it came to passing laws aimed at spying on American citizens and gutting the Bill of Rights. He was of much more use to them roaming free than dead or captured and he played brilliantly into their hands with one “Death to America” rant after another, secure in the knowledge that the hunt for him had been put on the back burner. Osama bin Laden was a more effective member of the Bush The Younger Administration than any 10 bright eyed young Christian Fascists.

This was the atmosphere in America when it was time to elect a new president in 2008. Is it any wonder that the American electorate recoiled in horror at the monster we had allowed to be created in our midst and voted their cynical, evil asses out of the White House and both Houses of Congress? These faux tough guys who were tough at everyone else’s expense with no risk to themselves were gone, and a new president had to deal with the massive wreckage they’d left behind. The economy was on the brink of The Second Great Depression, America was reviled throughout the world as a war mongering empire and the rights and freedoms that are the birthright of every American were under attack by our own government. Greed, tyranny, corruption and incompetence had brought America low.

So the country voted the bums out, hoping they just went away in disgrace when they saw the fruits of their handiwork, the monumental failures in every area of their policy making. Well, guess again. The Neo-Cons are out in force, all over TV, the newspapers and the internet defending their record and attacking the new administration that is not even 6 months old. They are crying like any schoolyard bully who has just had his nose bloodied by a former victim. They say Obama is un-American, the very same thing that got them tossed out on their ears. They cry that he is a Socialist, all the while collecting the benefits of the social legislation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the form of hefty pensions and protection of their Federally insured bank accounts, which would have evaporated in the financial crisis they themselves created if not for FDR.

They defend torture (!) and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as necessary emergency measures. Well, Einsteins, the use of torture and the suspension of the right to appear before a court of law to answer any charges against one is considered an emergency by most Americans. You don’t defend America by becoming less American and abandoning the ideals and the legal rights that so many have fought and died to create and preserve. You know, people who actually were tough guys and put their own lives and fortunes where their mouths were. The people who created this nation were considered liberals, if by liberal you mean caring about the other guy and putting his rights, his welfare and his pathway to opportunity on an equal footing as their own, even unto the point of dying for their beliefs.

Which is pretty much the opposite of the mindset of the Neo-Con men, a mindset entrenched in corporate America as it continues to operate as if Bush The Younger and his Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney were still calling the shots. Well, they’re not, and as it turned out they are being viewed more and more by rank and file Americans as the enemies of the state they always were. As so they complain and lash out and weep for themselves like petulant children. And our new president must still deal with cleaning up after these selfish infants, no matter how long and loud they wail. The mess America finds itself in is their mess, one they knew they were creating but did not care as long as they got theirs, a classic childhood problem that only careful guidance and stern parenting can correct. It’s time for these incompetent creeps to grow up and take their medicine. You want to have a say in how things get done, don’t act like you care, just care.

There are no trouble-free lives or perfect people. It’s not just you.

Why would anybody, governor, president or bus driver, apologize to anybody but his wife for having an affair? Are we a bunch of scolds all of a sudden, pointing shame-on-you fingers? The sex lives of others is none of our damned beeswax. Governors and presidents are dopes to play along with this infantile obsession and should tell nosy people to stay the hell out of their private business. They never seem to apologize for the stupid policies they implement and the dopey decisions they often make, so why do they feel they have to apologize for something that has no bearing on how they do their jobs and zero effect on the people they govern? Puzzling…

Why would anybody obsess over the manner of Michael Jackson’s death? The guy isn’t even cold yet and you have a cottage industry sprouting up wondering who was responsible for his drug use. Well, who else would that be? Us? And that whole bit about how society somehow failed him? Exactly what did we ever do to the guy? Listen to his records? Make him fabulously wealthy? Isn’t it his own business and his own responsibility how he ran his life? Who cares how he died? It’s a big loss and it’s sad, but certainly not something to convene an emergency session of Congress over. There hasn’t even been any autopsy results yet, so maybe we can let the poor guy rest and let his family deal with their pain with a little dignity. Oh wait, this is America, and we own our celebrities, dead or alive. Never mind…

Why would anyone who doesn’t live there think they can solve the problems in the Middle East? Even the best brains who do live there don’t have a clue. It’s an area most people in the world would consider uninhabitable filled with people who hate each other that the world would pretty much ignore if there wasn’t so much oil buried under the blazing sands in a lot of the countries there. You add the intertribal hatred to the insatiable greed for petroleum by the outside world and add a huge dash of tyrannical leaders wanting to be very, very important in the grand scheme of things and you have yourself a set of unsolvable problems. You’d think the Nobel Peace Prize committee would get tired of being burned and pass a rule barring the awarding of their prestigious prize to a bunch of clueless gas bags looking to earn Great Statesman points. Maybe the better deal in the Middle East is to let the people who have to live in that sweltering sandbox figure it out for themselves. They could do no worse. Or maybe they could, but it is their sandbox, and they are the ones who have to deal with any grand schemes made by dreamers. Better it should be home grown dreamers than carpetbaggers with ulterior motives who don’t give a rat’s ass about the actual people there or the quality of their lives.

Whether or not you believe in the threat of global warming, why would anybody oppose conservation measures and clean technology? Weren’t we always taught not to shit where we eat just because that’s the cleaner way to live? Why should we maintain a tidy planet only because of some dire threat? That’s like saying that if there is no possibility of global warming, well, pollute away! Poison the land and the waters and blacken the sky to our hearts’ content! Sorry, but our mothers raised us better than that. Let’s just clean up after ourselves because we’re supposed to and not ruin the playground for those who want to use it when we’re done. Imagine people treating your home like they do the world? It would be a long time before you invited them back, no? What’s right is right, and reason enough in itself to behave properly and be clean.

Why would anybody think it’s some sort of national tragedy that 3 million people were unprepared for the switch from analog to digital TV transmission? What, they didn’t have enough notice? Well, things change sometimes. How many of us are still sitting on huge music collections of vinyl records, cassettes and 8 track tapes? Nobody announced CDs, they just sort of happened. Now digital TV happened and that’s that. Your old TV antenna is a rotary phone now, a buggy whip. We all have to get with the program of cell phones, computers and all the rest of the doodads that are standard operating procedure in modern life. Or not. There’s always that option, one that works out just fine for the Amish. Life goes on…

Having enemies is no tragedy. Letting them define you is.

So, Michael Jackson has died at only 50. Fittingly enough, his death was surrounded in paradoxes and shrouded in mystery. A man of monumental talent, a singer, songwriter, dancer and all around entertainer, he lived his life as he saw fit, whether or not the rest of the world understood or approved. And it was by many accounts a bizarre world, made possible by fabulous wealth and a willingness to be considered strange. Only it probably didn’t feel strange at all to him, more likely it felt like home. And in the end, it was really no one else’s business since they weren’t the ones who had to live that life, he was. It was his to do with as he pleased.

His troubles were as well-documeted as his music career, even resulting in child-molestation charges, of which he was acquitted. That he preferred the company of children to adults was well known. The home he built for himself in California was basically a child’s theme park, aptly called Neverland. His adventures in self-invention led to a series of plastic surgeries that physically transformed him before the eyes of his public. Again, he didn’t seem to care what anybody thought of his metamorphosis. He also entered into a couple of oddball marriages, including one to the daughter of Elvis Presley, the original pop superstar who went his own way lifestyle-wise and died prematurely under mysterious circumstances.

Also like Elvis, he was always making dramatic comebacks, another #1 hit never seeming out of reach. At the time of his death he was in rehearsals for a spectacular European tour, the seats already sold out. The promoters of the tour recently had him undergo an extensive medical checkup and he was pronounced fit and healthy, further making his sudden death an enigma. Well, enigma or not, the world is mourning Michael Jackson today and his death is dominating all media outlets. Again like Elvis, it is his music that will be his enduring legacy, an impressive musical catalog that has long been a staple of popular American culture and will continue to be for years. And his breakthrough work in music video remains the gold standard for that genre.

Few actually knew the man, and no one owned him. He followed his own instincts for better or worse and lived life on his own terms, as far as that is possible. One of the most public and publicized people to ever live, he still maintained his privacy and shielded his 3 children from the white hot glare of his fame. He was a public figure, not public property. The shrewd business acumen that led him to launch a solo career at age 13 and outbid Paul McCartney on the Lennon-McCartney Beatles song catalog eventually failed him and he allegedly died in unbelievable debt, rumored to be in the hundreds of millions. But again, who knows? Like so much about the man and his life, speculation and rumors often take the place of hard facts.

He wasn’t in the business of confirming or denying all that much, and is beyond all that now. He leaves us like he came to us, a mystery and a very different person from most human beings. Once again he answers to no one and seeks no approval for who he is or how he lived or died. Michael Jackson was who he was, did what he did and thought what he thought. And that’s just fine, and his unbreakable right. In the end what we have is his music, and that’s more than enough. His album “Thriller” remains the single biggest selling album ever, and in total all his albums sold over 750 million copies, an astonishing figure. The mourning for him is heartfelt and real on every continent, not only his home nation. His art touched billions of lives. He spread joy and love. No matter what else he was or wasn’t, that’s an excellent legacy. Here’s hoping Michael Jackson finds the peace he never found here.

“She sells seashells by the sea shore” is not only a tongue twister, but also a classic illustration of a bad business plan. It’s far more profitable to sell them  inland where they are a novelty and not readily available for free.

You have to wonder what the one Supreme Court Justice out the nine of them was thinking when he dissented from the Court’s 8 to 1 decision that it is wrong and unconstitutional to strip-search a child. Maybe somebody should strip-search the hard drive on his computer and see what he’s downloading.

You have to wonder about President Mahmoud “Peewee the Puppet” Ahmadinejad of Iran demanding an apology from President Obama of America for his condemnation of Iran’s brutal reaction to the mass protests against the election results that saw Peewee getting more votes than there are voters. The authorities went ballistic, arresting, pummeling and killing protesters. Of course he didn’t deny the election fraud or the brutal crackdown, he just resented Mr. Obama mentioning these things in public. Obama has so far said nothing in response, figuring Peewee will soon have his hands pretty full trying to avoid getting killed along with the Mad Mullahs who pull his puppet strings in the coming Iranian civil war.

You have to wonder about people who drop casual cultural references to reality shows they assume everyone watches. Here’s a clue: everyone doesn’t. Most of us are happily unaware of who’s who in these white trash manifestos and the inside jokes and references mean zip to us. The standard reaction is “Who? What?” and then a very brief bit of wondering about such odd things. A no time are we tempted to tune in to “Lost in The Amazing Race With Desperate Untalented Nobodies.”

You have to really wonder about the screening process involved in picking a candidate for Governor in our states. Add Sanford to the names McGreevey, Spitzer, Palin and Shwarzennegger. Then again, when you look at the horrendous quality of the various State Legislatures, you stop wondering.

You have to wonder about Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire who was just arrested for running a 7 billion dollar investment scam. Not wonder about his consuming greed or his casual disregard for other human beings, but exactly how a con man from Texas got the name Sir Allen Stanford. It seems he had dual citizenship in the United States and Antigua, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. You also have to wonder about the people who knighted him, providing him with the “Sir.” Did they think there was any other reason an American investment guy applies for citizenship in Antigua than laundering money and hiding from American authorities? He’s only around the 100th thief to do this. You’d think they’d get the drift by now, no?

You have to wonder why U.S. corporations have still not hired the guys who talk young men in the prime of their lives into becoming suicide bombers. These guys could sell ice to Eskimos. Maybe General Motors wouldn’t be in the dire straits it finds itself in if they had hired some of these guys to sell their cars. They make P.T Barnum look like a rank amateur.

You have to wonder about the strategy of dismantling the Iraqi Army once they were defeated. Armies don’t give a crap who’s the boss of the country, they do their army duty for whoever is the boss. It sure wasn’t their idea to have Sadam Hussein in charge of things. Now that it’s time for America to leave Iraq it looks like the Iraqi Keystone Kops will be asked to keep order over there, under the direction of General Barney Fife. Good luck to Iraq, or whatever the new countries that form from its ashes call themselves.