Category Archives: Jamie Dimon

04/25/2014
3 Comments
AMP, Capital in the 21st Century, Chase Bank, Columbus Zoo, Great Recession, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, Koch Brothers, Nashville MTA, Paul Krugman, Pornography, Thomas Picketty

Hot Air

Capital Letters

I’ve worked at the Book Corner now for about four and a half years. In that time, we’ve sold our share of blockbusters. There’ve been the 50 Shades of Grey series, Go the F●k to Sleep, the Hunger Games trilogy, and, of course R.R. Martin’s Games of Thrones franchise. Add to those immediate splashes the ongoing flow out the door of the Freakonomics pair of books and anything by Malcolm Gladwell.

From our vantage point, the book biz is as healthy as can be. And the hits, apparently, keep on coming. The big deal these days is French economist Thomas Piketty.

Picketty & Book

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Kids, Piketty’s huge take on that dismal science, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, is flying off the shelves. It’s big in sheer heft, coming in at 685 pages. It’s big in price —$39.95. And it’s big in sales, natch, moving out its entire first printing less than a week after it hit the streets. Piketty’s publisher, Belknap Press (an imprint of Harvard U. Press), is hustling out a second printing, due May 12.

Literary experts are scratching their heads over the Capital phenomenon. Economics books are about as sexy Donald Trump in a Speedo®. Piketty, though, earned the imprimatur of the liberals’ darling and this holy land’s No. 1 haranguer against the 1%, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. New York magazine has called Piketty the “rock star economist.” Slate and The Nation are fawning over Piketty. Hell, next thing you know, Vanity Fair‘ll be doing a two-page, Annie Leibovitz spread of him in a Speedo®.

The Nation‘s reviewer quotes from Piketty’s Capital: an “…apparently small gap between the return on capital and the rate of growth can in the long run have powerful and destabilizing effects on the structure and dynamics of social inequality.” I consider myself a fairly smart potato but I have no goddamned idea in holy hell what that sentence means. Then again, I’m afflicted by a sort of economics retardation. On the third hand, how many people do you know actually understand the byzantine utterances of economists?

Much of the reason Piketty is breathing the same rarified air as Suzanne Collins and E.L. James is he actually offers strategies to ward off the oncoming crushing global oligarchy that’ll keep the rich ever richer and the poor ever poorer — and an ever-growing swath of the world population. Piketty, among other things, calls for taxing the bejesus out of obscene inherited wealth.

My guess is that millions of copies of Piketty’s Capital will be conspicuously left on coffee tables, the last 4-500 pages of which never being read. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was purchased for precisely the same reason some 25 years ago. People heard how exciting Hawking’s scribblings were and they dashed out out en masse get the book.

Problem was they found they had to actually read the damned thing which turned out to be a tad daunting.

I have no doubt most purchasers of Capital will come to the same conclusion.

Not that I’m getting all superior here: I probably wouldn’t get past page 63 of Piketty’s epic. The only diff. is I’m not going to buy the book in the first place. Economics, remember, is the dismal science.

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Filthy Lucre

Speaking of wealth, if you’ve made your wad in the porn rackets, Chase Bank doesn’t want your dough.

Honest. One of the too-big-too-fail financial mobsters of the world has sent letters to depositors who work in porn advising them to take their bank accounts elsewhere.

AVN Awards

Porn Star Michelle Bombshell & Date At AVN Awards — Her Money’s No Good At Chase (photo by Nate “Igor Smith)

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Imagine that! Chase’s parent co., JP Morgan Chase, made billions — shoot, hundreds of billions — defrauding customers by selling them bundles of mortgages that the bank knew were losers. Chase not long ago paid a record $13 billion fine for such activity, which largely caused the near global collapse of 2007-08.

Now, arts organizations, social service agencies, schools, libraries, and other cultural outfits are starving for cash and millions are still out of work. For that, JP Morgan Chase, rewarded its CEO, Jamie Dimon, to the tune of $20 million in 2013. Who sez crime doesn’t pay?

Anyway, if you take your clothes off for dough before rolling cameras, your deposits are dirty, as Chase sees it. The Chase gang, obviously, has an idiosyncratic sense of morality.

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Piling On

Okay, let’s stick like glue to the arch-criminally wealthy. The Koch Boys fund the supposed grass-roots org. called Americans for Prosperity.

A for P stood on its head to stop Nashville, Tennessee’s proposed mass transit plan. Known as AMP, the $175 million project would improve movement into and around Nashville, cut down on auto traffic in the center city, and even clean up the air a bit. Natch, the Koch Monsters saw it as a commie plot to rob them of all their billions. Why? Who knows?

Koch Bros.

Aspiring Archcriminals

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The Kochs, though, through their dummy assoc., leaned on the Tennessee state legislature to crush the Amp project — and any others like it.

These are the fellows, I remind you, on whose behalf the Reagan/Bush/Bush Supreme Court has turned American elections over to the plutocracy. Corporations are now people. Money is now speech. And the rich now run this holy land brazenly and without apology.

And if you need to take a bus to get anywhere in Nashville, well, fuck you. Go buy yourself a limousine like the Koch Boys did.

[Bonus anger-button issue: The Kochs of late have been standing on their heads again, this time to stop a tax levy to support the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo. Because, as you well know, animals are takers.]

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03/17/2014
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B-Line Trail, Bloomington Certified High Tech Park, Climate Change Denial, Goddard Space Flight Center, Great Recession, Guardian UK, Habitat for Humanity, Huffington Post, Jamie Dimon, Jim Hightower, JP Morgan Chase, NASA, Overpopulation, Ralph Nader, Soma Coffee

Hot Air

The Mob

Ralph Nader quotes Jim Hightower in Saturday’s Huffington Post:

Assume you ran a business that was found guilty of bribery, forgery, defrauding homeowners, fleecing investors, swindling consumers, cheating credit card holders, violating US trade laws, and bilking American soldiers. Can you even imagine the punishments you’d get? Howe about zero? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. No jail time. Not even a fine. Plus, you get to stay on as boss, you get to keep all the loot you gained from the crime spree, and you even get an $8.5 million pay raise!

The hoodlum H-tower speaks of would  be the big boss of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, a man whom, Nader reminds us, proclaims for all the world to hear that he is “so damn proud of this company.”

Dimon

“Proud”

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We keep forgetting that reprobates like Dimon were responsible for crashing the entire world’s economy back in the mid-aughts. It wasn’t socialism, or communism, or same-sex marriage, or legalized pot, or a Manchurian Candidate president from Kenya, or even god’s will that millions more Americans now live below the poverty line, millions are unemployed, municipalities are going broke, school budgets are being slashed, libraries are closing, and…, and…, oh, it’s all too depressing.

All those ills were brought to us courtesy of the Liar’s Poker, casino-mentality, degenerate gamblers in fancy Wall Street offices (and their coat-holders in Congress).

They all are the very definition of mobsters.

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Trade Rumors

Here’s an idea regarding the development of some land along the B-Line Trail that cuts through central Bloomington. Habitat for Humanity wants to develop a little strip of woods along the Trail, just northwest of downtown B-town. So the city’s angling for a zoning variance to allow HforH to build a couple of dozen homes for the needy there.

Habitat/B-Line

Habitat’s B-Line Neighborhood Is Next Door To…

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And, according to folks who don’t think much of the idea, the city’s positioning the question as an either-or: either you want to help Habitat do its good works or you don’t. The problem acc’d’g to some, is that Habitat’s property is the last lush green space near downtown. That, and it is apparently going to be difficult to develop.

Instead, say a group of petitioners, the city and Habitat should swap land. The city-owned Certified Tech Park butts up against the Woods parcel. The CTP already is zoned for high-density residential development, the argument goes, and much of the land is cleared.

Bloomington CTP

…Bloomington’s Certified Tech Park

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The simple solution? Let HforH build its homes on the Tech Park site and let the city take over the Woods and transform that land into a Parks & Rec facility.

If you buy this argument, slap your sig. on the petition calling for the land swap.

Then again, if you think the city’s gonna let low-income folks live in its shiny new neighborhood, you must believe you live in a liberal college town.

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A Dickens Of A Tale

Overheard at Soma the other day, a barista talking to a customer:

My parents told me my actual last name was Nintendo. When I was about six, they said I was the heir to the Nintendo family fortune but that my original parents disowned me because they didn’t like the way I looked. So I was adopted.

Does too much coffee do that to people?

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The End Is Near — Maybe

And finally, it took a foreign newspaper to report on disturbing study by this holy land’s own NASA. Our Murrican space geeks have sponsored some alarming research with the help of scads of scientists from a variety of disciplines that show humanity’s present rate of consumption and excretion could potentially topple our whole house of cards within a few decades.

Fin

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We’re using so much stuff and belching so much of our wastes into the air, the water, and the soil that our civilization itself could collapse of its own weight. Don’t laugh — countless civilizations before us have gone all to hell for a screwing up what they knew of the world a lot less than we are.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has submitted the study to the peer-reviewed journal of the International Society for the Journal of Ecological Economics. That gang contemplates stuff like this; you know, how much it costs us as a species to make sure everybody’s got all the latest hand-held devices and to keep our petro-plutocracy in charge of, well, everything.

Natch, Murrican newspapers and TV news outlets haven’t touched this thing yet because it has nothing to do with Justin Beiber or a white man shooting an unarmed black kid. Those, of course, are the only topics of import in this mad, mad, world.

Anyway, the study doesn’t come right out and say we’re doomed, only that we could be. There’s a chance, see? Except folks who think scientists are a political party would pooh-pooh the report out of hand, if only they had the intellect to understand it.

Inhofe Book Cover

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And here’s a conclusion the study makes that’s sure to make Ma & Pa Kettle bristle: We ought to stop having so many kids. Yup, overpopulation is strangling us, the study sez. There ain’t enough raw stuff on this planet to manufacture the products needed to satisfy all 7B of us. The conclusion is, those of us who have need to make sure that the rest of us have not; otherwise, we lucky few won’t have as much as we want.

Yeesh. So, when’s the last time you read the word overpopulation in your morning newspaper? Or heard the word uttered by a blonde, lacquered anchor lady?

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06/14/2012
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Book Corner, Eric Clapton, Goodfellas, Henry Hill, Jamie Dimon, Liar's Poker, Lucchese Crime Family, Mafia, Martin Scorsese, Michael Lewis, Nick Pileggi, Penguin Classics, Salomon Brothers, Taxi Driver, Tony Bennett, Wiseguy

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“‘C’mon, people, we’re not selling truth!'” — Michael Lewis, quoting a typical PA announcement on the Salomon Brothers sales floor.

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RAIN

A young guy came into the Book Corner yesterday afternoon. He’s a regular. Comes in once every week or two and buys a couple of Penguin Classics (which, BTW, are among the coolest books — they’re inexpensive and the titles are, well, classic, like “The Three Musketeers” or “Humboldt’s Gift”).

Anyway, we told each other how fabulous the weather has been the last couple of weeks. He splashed cold water on the small talk, though, by saying his father, a farmer, is worried.

The old man, the guy reported, raises corn and soybeans on his spread about forty minutes west of Bloomington. Pops’ crops need a good soaking rain, and quick.

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I’ve heard talk the area’s water table is down some 1o inches.

“Things are alright right now,” the guy said, “but if we go any longer without rain, my dad’s going to be in trouble.”

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ON THE TOWN

Click.

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HENRY HILL IS DEAD

One of the most despicable characters ever portrayed in film was a real person. An associate of New York’s Lucchese crime gang, Henry Hill turned rat back in 1980, saving his own hide by cooperating with the Feds who slammed his old pals into the joint.

Hill then told his story to Nick Pileggi and the ensuing book, “Wiseguy” was made into the iconic mobster movie, “Goodfellas.”

Henry Hill

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Ray Liotta played Hill in Martin Scorsese’s pic. The movie opens with the character Tommy DeVito repeatedly plunging a big kitchen chopping knife into the torso of a mobster named Billy Batts. Tommy is one of Hill’s two closest companions. Batts is in the trunk of Hill’s car.

Hill holds the trunk lid open as DeVito skewers Batts. The camera zooms in on Hill’s face to a freeze-frame. We hear Hill’s off-screen voice saying, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Tony Bennett’s “I Go From Rags to Riches” begins to blare on the soundtrack and we’re off.

Ray Liotta As Henry Hill

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Scorsese plays most of Hill’s story for laughs. “Goodfellas” could have been one of the darkest movies he ever made. Shoot, “Taxi Driver” might have been a giggle-fest compared to “Goodfellas” had Scorsese elected to portray Hill’s and DeVito’s and their partner Jimmie “The Gent” Conway’s workaday world straight.

I’m no shrink but I’ll guarantee you Hill et al were classic sociopaths.

Funny thing is, what should have been an abhorrent tale of evil turned out be something more akin to a recruitment ad for the Mafia.

Not that people who watched the flick actually tripped all over themselves in a rush to become connected killers and thieves but “Goodfellas” popularized the speech patterns, the music, and the outward trappings of the lifestyle of New York’s Italian-American reprobates.

“Cool” Guys

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Henry Hill and his smartly dressed pals became more cool guys to be aped than terrifying monsters to be loathed.

Even Tony Bennett has to attribute a pinch of his resurgent success on “Good fellas” and similar glamorizations of Mob life.

Mob movies of the last 40 years offer stories that satisfy some of our simplest needs in a changing world. The New York Mob lived in a self-contained universe where justice was swift, morality — such as it was — was  clearly defined, and hard work and brotherhood brought rich rewards.

If most guys in real life weren’t willing to plunge chopping knives into each others’ torsi, many at least wanted to sound and look like Henry Hill and his crew.

I don’t know if Scorses intended that result. I also don’t know if he’s ever regretted creating roll models for lunkheads.

“Goodfellas” in that sense reminds me of Michael Lewis’s book, “Liar’s Poker.” Lewis describes the amoral world of the Salomon Brothers investment bank in the mid-1980’s. Saint Ronald Reagan’s deregulations and the lust for obscene amounts of cash created a gang of bond traders and salesmen who thought nothing of screwing customers, each other, and, for that matter, the nation’s economy simply to scale the company’s success ladder as measured by each participant’s year-end bonuses.

Bonuses which, by the way, far too often totaled into the hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

Lewis had hoped to expose this bankrupt world and thereby convince young people, who were beginning to enroll in business schools at unprecedented rates, to move into other, more worthy disciplines.

Instead, kids got off on the picture of greed and evil Lewis painted. Thousands of college students wrote to Lewis to ask him advice on how to get into the racket. He was shocked by their reaction.

Next thing you knew, avarice and narcissism had completely engulfed this holy land and, by extension, the rest of the world. The orgy went on up until the big crash on 2008. It still goes on in certain quarters today (I’m thinking Jamie Dimon and his confreres).

Talk about unintended consequences.

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LET IT RAIN

For the farmers.

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05/26/2012
2 Comments
Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bill Maher, Book Corner, Donald Trump, Dr. Joseph Mackey, Ernest Hemingway, Eye Center of Southern Indiana, Jamie Dimon, Lady Gaga, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Sleep, Steve Wozniak, Tea Party, The Godfather Part II

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” — Ernest Hemingway

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Scary? Scary How?

Just a tidbit from Bill Maher’s latest spew:

“If Obama were as radical as they claim, here’s what he already would have done: pulled the troops out of Afghanistan, given us Medicare for all, ended the drug war, cut the defense budget in half, and turned Dick Chaney over to The Hague. Here’s what Obama actually did: he cut taxes and spending…, he didn’t go on a spending spree, he didn’t break up the ‘too big to fail’ banks — they’ve only gotten bigger and fail-y-er. That’s not what liberals wanted; that’s what conservatives wanted…. [U]nder Obama, there’s more drilling than ever. That’s not what environmentalists wanted; that’s what conservatives wanted. Obama spent most of last year conceding the Republican premise that government needed cutting. That’s not what progressives wanted; that’s what the Tea Party wanted. The Dow was at 7949 when he took office, now it’s at 12,000 and over. Corporates profits are at their highest ever. If he’s a socialist, he’s a lousy one. He could not be less threatening if he was walking home with iced tea and Skittles.”

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I DUNNO. WHADDA YOU WANNA DO?

Don’t do a single thing today until you visit the Pencil’s GO! Events Listings.

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SLEEPLESS IN SUCCESSVILLE

I am a world champion napper. Napping is one of humankind’s finest pursuits. A day spent without a nap is a day wasted.

I’ve been partial to naps ever since I emerged from the womb and yawned.

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Imagine how thrilled I was when my cardiologist told me that due to my congenitally malformed heart, I ought to take a nap whenever I feel the need for one. (Almost as giddy as when he told me drinking a glass of wine and eating a piece of chocolate a day would be of great benefit to me — I nearly kissed him.)

Now, I love working at the Book Corner save for one terrible drawback — Margaret, the owner of the place, won’t let me take a nap while I’m on the clock. The tyrant.

Apparently, much of the world seems to be able to get by without naps. Poor souls.

And, if I can believe what I read, there are those who have energy to burn, who are on the go, go, go, all day long, who can get by with only three or four hours of sleep in a night.

Crazy, no?

Do I Have To Do This?

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Bill Clinton is one of those people. I suppose any number of presidents and aspirants to that sleepless office have less than the average bear’s need for slumber.

I’ve met dozens of people who are great successes in business and entertainment, many of whom view sleeping at night as a kind of annoyance. They can’t get anything done when they’re asleep, they complain. They’re aghast at the idea of taking a nap.

Man.

It seems as though the real hard-chargers in this mixed-up world, people like Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Wozniak, Jamie Dimon and any Mexican drug cartel boss worth his salt rarely go to sleep.

Who Has Time To Sleep?

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Maybe that’s the key to their fabulous success. Maybe that’s why Donald Trump and Lady Gaga are who they are. They’re blazing trails while the rest of us are laying on the sofa.

Oh, sure, they have piles of dough. Big deal. I’ve got my naps.

I was thinking about all this yesterday when I went to go see young Dr. Joe Mackey at the Eye Center. I went in for my one-week follow up exam after eye surgery. The verdict: All is well. That’s pretty much all Mackey said to me.

As always, he was in a mad rush.

I’ll bet he’s one of the people who don’t sleep much. The guy darts from room to room like a crystal meth fiend. He once told me that on his day for surgery he performs 14 or so procedures. Sheesh! The other days of the week he’s peering into and jiggering with the eyes of dozens and dozens of people each day.

If I tried to keep up his pace for fifteen minutes I’d have to take a nap. A good long one — 45 minutes, maybe, or an hour.

What An Exhausting Day!

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On the bell curve of human sleep needs, he and I occupy the opposite flanges.

Guys like Mackey, big time sports stars, Hollywood actors and actresses, corporate CEOs, big city mayors — all sorts of high achievers seem to be racing every minute of the day. And their days last from before dawn often until after midnight.

Mackey could have elected to live a nice, relaxed lifestyle. He could have opened his own opthalmology practice in some far off locale where he’d see a couple of patients a day. That’s what I would have done. He could do one eye surgery a week. Maybe one every couple of weeks.

Then he could take a nap.

You’re My Third Patient This Month!

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But he chose to go to work for a multi-million-dollar eyeball factory. The Eye Center has dozens of employees, its own surgery center in the basement, enough high-tech, high-buck machines to fill a medium-sized warehouse, and most likely a huge debt load. If you work for old man Grossman and his partners, you’d better be ready to hustle from room to room, checking patients out and sending them home, calling for the next one, chop chop, saying only what you need to say, generating revenue.

This, said Hyman Roth to Michael Corleone in ” The Godfather Part II,” is the business we’ve chosen.

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We talk a lot about doctors needing a comforting bedside manner these days. We need the doc to hold our hands while she tells us to lay off the pie and the french fries. That’s fine for a general practitioner. They have to lay the oil on us if only to get us to open up and tell them about the ache in our knees or the funny mole on our back.

But specialists like Mackey don’t need to cajole information out of us. They’ve got special skills and devices that can tell them a hundred times more about us than we ever could. Then, when it’s time to act, they wield other devices like Jedi knights, they flutter their fingers over our most fragile organs with a deftness that borders on magic.

Has The Patient Been Prepped?

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Mackey shined some tiny beacons into my eyes and muttered notes to an assistant who transcribed his impressions at the keyboard. “Terrific,” he said. “Excellent.” “Very good.” “Healing well.” “Vision better than can be expected.”

I felt flattered, as if somehow I had a hand in the whole procedure. “Yeah,” I said, “I feel great. No complaints.”

Dr. Mackey recoiled slightly from his machine, as if he were surprised I was there. And you know what? He probably was.

He’d been commenting on his own handiwork. He’s a borderline magician and he knows it.

Voila — You Can See!

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And the truth is, without that confidence, without that arrogance, he wouldn’t be one-tenth as good as he is.

How big does your ego have to be to carve up another person’s eyeball and hope not only that you don’t blind the poor sap but can actually make him see better?

Answer: Huge.

Mackey pulled his diagnostic machine away and wished me a pleasant weekend. And like that he was out the door. He moved so fast I thought there’d be a sonic boom.

Dr. Joe Mackey is of a different breed than I am. Maybe even a different species. But that’s what makes him so spectacularly good.

Me? I’m gonna take a nap.

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05/16/2012
1 Comment
Andromeda Galaxy, Australopithecus, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Joe the Plumber, Kirkwood Observatory, Marcy Kaptur, Me Party, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Shana Alexander, Tea Party, Toledo Blade

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me, it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.” — Shana Alexander

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TINY

Just a reminder, you can broaden your visual horizon up to a trillion-fold tonight — for free.

Each Wednesday night, the astro-geeks who run IU’s Kirkwood Observatory, throw its doors open to the public. They’ll actually let you peer out at the universe through its main telescope, a 12-inch refractor, and they’ll show you tons of other cool, geeky things.

If you ever want to feel infinitesimally small, try sneaking a peek at some celestial landmark (or should I say spacemark?) sometime. Say, for instance, the Kirkwood astronuts point their device at the Andromeda Galaxy, the first cosmic structure to be identified as existing outside our own Milky Way Galaxy. The Andromeda is approximately 2.6M light years away from Earth.

M-31: The Andromeda Galaxy

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That is, if you picked up your hyper-strong flashlight, pointed it at the Andromeda, and flicked it on, it would take the its light more than two and a half million years to reach that galaxy.

Or, putting it another way, the Andromeda we’re looking at today actually existed when Australopithecus first started using stone tools in Africa.

Great-Great-Great-Great… Great-Great-Great Grandma

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Not even your grandfather walked that far to school in the middle of winter.

BTW: that trillion-fold reference I made earlier? Just a breezy estimation. It’s said that when a six-foot tall person stands at sea level, the horizon appears to be about three miles away. In other words, that’s pretty much haw far your horizontal vision range is on Earth.

Now, a light year is 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles. Let’s put that in English: that’s more than 5.8 trillion miles. Not million. Not billion. Trillion.

Now do you feel small?

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JOE THE SHOVELER

Do you want to feel even smaller?

Great-great… great-Grandma’s (pictured above) progeny — us, Homo Sapiens sapiens — includes within its ranks one Joe the Plumber.

That’s right, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher gained international fame when he confronted candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail during the 2008 race for the president.

At Least One Of These Guys Isn’t Telling The Truth

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Wurzelbacher told Obama that he was planning to buy his boss’s plumbing business and would probably make more than $250,000 a year after doing so. Therefore, Obama’s proposed tax hike on quarter-plus-millionaires would harm him or at the very least make his dream harder to achieve.

Obama responded by saying, in part, that some wealth ought to be redistributed.

Oh, did the Republicans jump on that! Next thing you knew, Obama was painted as the depraved spawn of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Son of Sam all rolled into one.

Obama’s Dad

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Not only that, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was rechristened “Joe the Plumber” and became the darling of the Right and eventually a standard bearer for the Me Party.

Only Joe the Plumber was not what he said he was. The Toledo Blade did some digging and found that, although J the P said he worked under his boss’s plumbing license, he was not legally permitted to do plumbing work in the state of Ohio. “He is… not registered to operate as a plumber in Ohio,” the Blade reported, “which means he’s not a plumber.”

Oh.

Turns out his “plan” to buy out his boss’s operation was casually discussed during his hiring process six years previously. In other words, J the P’s grand design was part of the normal bullshit bandied about during any job interview.

Additionally, a close examination of J the P’s finances revealed that he had precisely zero chance in the foreseeable future of buying out his boss’s successful firm.

So, at least J the P was revealed to posses one requisite talent for a plumber — he is expert at shoveling shit.

Joe Can Do This

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But wait — that’s not the end of the story. J the P is still with us. In fact, he may be reporting for work in the US Capitol come January. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher is running for Congress in Ohio’s 9th District. He faces long-time House Dem Marcy Kaptur.

And guess what — he has an awfully good chance of winning. Right-wingers and Me Party-ists from around the country are contributing to his campaign.

Darwin had it right: we didn’t ascend from the apes, we descended from them.

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DIMON IS A BOWL’S BEST FRIEND

I’m not a violent man so when the revolution comes I won’t be in favor of chopping off the heads of the greedy hyper-capitalist no-goodniks who’ve turned this holy land into a tin-horn banana republic.

I do have an idea for how we ought to deal with Jamie Dimon, though.

We, the new bosses after the overthrow, will force him to earn his daily bread by scrubbing public toilets. Those in parks, say, or in non-profit cultural institutions.

Why not? It’s good, honest work. Somebody has to do it. Why not Jamie?

Why Not, Jamie?

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In fact, what with his vaunted rep as a brilliant business strategist, he’d probably be able to form a very efficient operation employing hundreds or even thousands of people.

All of them doing real work that would benefit people.

But no matter how busy Jamie might be setting up his new biz empire, he would be compelled to personally scrub at least a half dozen porcelain princesses a day — we’d hate to have him lose that hands -on experience.

Ain’t I a dreamer?

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05/11/2012
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Bain Capital, Bullying, Cranbrook School, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, Kin Hubbard, Mitt Romney, Pity the Billionaire, Thomas Frank

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.” — Kin Hubbard

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YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, BABY

In the first chapter of Thomas Frank‘s latest book, he describes the ways people during the Great Depression rallied around each other.

Groups of farmers, for instance, would pitch in to help save another farmer whose land was in danger of being foreclosed on. And if they couldn’t scrape up enough cash, why, they’d all go down to the town en masse and shake their fists at the president of the bank.

Solidarity

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People were angry, Frank observes, and they knew precisely where to direct their rage.

The point of this and other anecdotes in the chapter was that 75 years ago just plain folks understood that they were all in this together. The misfortunes that befell seemingly every other person in America, they knew, had a hell of a lot to do with an economic system that was rigged to ensure money would remain in the hands of the moneyed.

Mr. Moneybags

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It was really a heartening account of what I can only describe as patriotism. Neighbors cared for neighbors. Americans felt a kinship with each other (as long as they were white, natch).

Frank concludes the chapter by flashing ahead to the 21st Century. He describes visiting a Tea Party rally. The participants are as angry as their predecessors from the Great Depression were. Only the Tea Party-ists’ rage isn’t directed against banksters and plutocrats. No, it’s aimed at those people an earlier generation would have embraced and comforted.

One Tea Party placard Frank describes says everything you need to know about this holy land today: “Your mortgage,” it reads, “is not my problem.”

Go Help Yourself

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Pick up “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Resurgence of the American Right” if you get a chance. If you need to economize, wait for it to come out in paperback on September 18th.

♢

BULLY PEOPLE

Speaking of plutocrats, how about that Jamie Dimon, the capo di tutti capi of JP Morgan Chase, announcing yesterday that his firm lost a couple of billion dollars last year on some extremely risky “positions”?

Dimon, of course, is speaking in code — he really means he and his fellow degenerate gamblers chased bad bets with more bad bets.

Dimon: “Believe Me, I Can Stop Any Time I Want.”

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Addicts and obsessives all seem to share the predilection to soft-soap their unhealthy habits, and Dimon is no different.

The Me Party-ists don’t see Dimon and his compares as the problem, though.

Perhaps he and his pals aren’t easy enough targets for the Me Party-ists. Should that be true, I might be tempted to come up with yet another snarky moniker for the folks who gave us Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann: The Bully Party.

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BULLY BOY

Yes, Mitt Romney bullied kids way back when he was a student at Richboy Tech.

I don’t like it. No one should like it.

“I’m Tougher Than A Fag!”

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But I hope we’re not going to write off all pols for the nitwit, often cruel, things they did as teenagers. There is, after all, redemption, no?

I prefer to write off Romney for the bullying he’s done to people as an adult.

♢

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

Friday, May  11, 2012

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Exhibits, “Blended Harmonies: Music and Religion in Nepal”; through July 1st — “Esse Quam Videri (To Be, Rather than To Be Seen): Muslim Self Portraits; through June 17th — “From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”; through July 1st

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — Exhibit, “Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze”; through June 29th

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Arts Center — Exhibits at various galleries: Angela Hendrix-Petry, Benjamin Pines, Nate Johnson, and Yang Chen; all through May 29th

◗ Trinity Episcopal Church — Art exhibit, “Creation,” collaborative mosaic tile project; through May 31st

◗ Monroe County Public Library — Art exhibit, “Muse Whisperings,” water color paintings by residents of Sterling House; through May 31st

◗ Monroe County History Center — Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

◗ B-Line Trail at the Bloomington Banquet Sculpture — Bloomington Bikes Week, Women’s Ride: Noon

◗ Deer Park Manor — Edible Lotus Night Bazaar, tastings from 20 local restaurants; 6pm

◗ Buskirk-Chumley Theater — Cardinal Stage Company presents “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; 7pm

◗ Boxcar Books — James Capshew reads from his book, “Herman B. Wells: The Promise of the American University”; 7pm

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◗ IU Cinema — Film, “The Kid with a Bike”; 7pm

◗ IU SOFA, upstairs theater — Ryder Film Series, “The Raw and the Cooked”; 7pm — “444 Last Day on Earth”; 8:45pm

◗ Panache Dance — Jennifer Luna teaches salsa with dance party to follow; 7:30pm

◗ IU Woodburn Hall — Ryder Film Series, “Keyhole”; 7:45pm

◗ Cafe Django — Earplane, Latin-Brazilian jazz; 8-11pm

◗ IU SOFA, downstairs theater — Ryder Film Series, “The Fairy”; 8:15pm

◗ The Bluebird — Kip Moore; 9pm

◗ Bear’s Place — Qwintis Sential, Lonewolfe 10man; 9pm

◗ Uncle Elizabeth’s — Vicci Laine and the West End Girls; 10pm & midnight

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◗ The Comedy Attic — Dan Telfer; 8 & 10:30pm

◗ The Bishop — Dave Walter Karaoke; 11pm

♢

04/23/2012
Leave a comment
Age of Reagan, Bloomington Indiana, Book Corner, Frank Sinatra, Hoboken New jersey, Jamie Dimon, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Labor Unions, Lloyd Blankfein, Parade Magazine, Prostitution, Santa Clause Indiana, Secret Service, Vikram Pandit, World Book and Copyright Day

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Read The Electron Pencil everyday, especially now that we have daily event listings. Scroll down to our Go section. What are you waiting for?” — Big Mike Glab

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WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK….

So, Bloomington has been blessed by Parade Magazine as the fourth-hardest working town in these Great United States, Inc.

I don’t know if Bloomingtonians are dancing in the streets just yet (I’m still sitting in my underwear in my garage office typing out this bilge, after all) but I’m going to have to dump some cold water on all the glee.

Typical Monday Morning In Bloomington

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What in the world does this arbitrary list mean? Do the people of, say, Santa Clause, Indiana, which is not on the list, just sit around dreaming of Christmas? Does the populace of Hoboken, New Jersey refuse to work because they’re busy listening to hometown boy Frank Sinatra’s records?

“I Just Don’t Have The Time To Work.”

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Here’s the most troubling thing about Parade’s survey and findings: Bloomington ranked so high mainly because our citizens are, as a group, the most willing in the United States to work weekends (“an astounding 15 points above the national average”).

Ever since unions started becoming unfashionable and workers rights turned into a pie-in-the-sky ideal in this Land of Reagan, Americans have been compelled to work longer hours and sacrifice more of their personal and family lives for employers who have been laying them off as never before. The weekend as well as the lunch hour and, for that matter, even an uninterrupted dinner have come to be viewed as luxuries.

I wouldn’t throw a party for the Parade ranking.

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READ TO LIVE — LIVE TO READ

Happy World Book and Copyright Day!

Bet you didn’t know this holiday existed. Unless I missed the news, I don’t think there’ll be a parade down Kirkwood Avenue today in honor of it.

Why Not?

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Here’s what I suggest you do — take your favorite book to work or school today and just give it to somebody. It could be a stranger or your best friend. No matter, just give her or him a book.

And if the loss of the book makes you feel deprived, I have a simple remedy for that, as well. Go to your local independent bookseller (he he) and buy a new one.

Simple, no?

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WELL, I NEVER!

So, John Edwards goes on trial today for the heinous crime of conspiring to conceal his extramarital affair during his aborted presidential run in 2008. Additionally, the Secret Service/prostitutes scandal continues to race along.

This weekend whiny Joe Lieberman, Independent (read: incapable of commitment) senator from Connecticut, wagged his finger and revealed that one of the offending Secret Service agents actually stayed at the hotel where President Obama was scheduled to occupy when he arrived in Colombia. The horror!

Lieberman: They Had Sex, Those Fiends!

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Other than obvious atrocities like shooting an unarmed black teenager on a dark street in a white neighborhood or Mel Gibson offering his opinion on anything, the worst thing you can do in this holy land is have anything other than missionary position sex outside the sacred bonds of marriage.

Ergo, Secret Service agents have been fired and may yet be prosecuted and a presidential candidate whose top talking point was the poor eventually may be sentenced to time in the joint.

Meanwhile, these fine citizens continue to roam the streets freely:

The Unindicted

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♢

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

Monday, April 23, 2012

◗ Bloomington, Citywide — IU’s Arts Week Everywhere 2012; Ongoing, various times

◗ The Kinsey Institute Gallery — “Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze,” exhibit, art by women examining men; Ongoing

From the “Man as Object” Exhibition

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◗ IU Memorial Union, State Room East — Lecture, Dr. Joseph Collentine, chair of Modern Languages at Northern Arizona University, “On the Compatibility between SLA Corpus and Variationist Research”; 2:30pm

◗ IU Asian Culture Center — Henna 101 with introduction and hands-on application; 5:30pm

◗ IU Auditorium — “Spirit of Indiana Showcase,” annual student-athlete awards gala; 6:30pm

◗ Bell Trace Health and Living Center — “Life in a British Period Drama,” 4-session class on British class life; 6:30pm

◗ Madame Walker Theatre Center — Auditions for “Queen Esther — A Fearless Shero”; 6-8pm

◗ IU Hutton Honors College, Great Room — Indiana Review Editors Showcase; 7-8:30pm

◗ The Player’s Pub — Songwriter Showcase; 8pm

◗ The Bishop — No Requests with DJ Burke; 8pm

◗ The Bluebird — Dave Walters Karaoke; 8pm

◗ The Bishop — Spirit of ’68 Presents: WOODS with Mmoss & Apache Dropout; 9pm

◗ The Bluebird — Laidback Luke; 9pm

Laidback Luke

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03/01/2012
1 Comment
ACORN, Andrew Breitbart, Curtis LeMay, Erlene Stetson, Fran Lebowitz, George W. Bush, George Wallace, George Washington, Goldman Sachs, J. Edgar Hoover, Jamie Dimon, Janis Joplin, Joseph Stalin, KGB, Lee Atwater, Liar's Poker, Lloyd Blankfein, Mark Kruzan, Mark Twain, Mercedes Benz, Michael Lewis, Mitt Romney, Molly Ivins, Orval Faubus, R.E. Paris, Rick Santorum, Russia, Shirlay Sherrod, Slavery, The Outfit, Thomas Jefferson, Vladimir Putin

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.” — Fran Lebowitz (h/t to RE Paris)

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GOOD RIDDANCE, ANDREW BREITBART

“I’ve never killed a man but I’ve read several obituaries with glee.” — Mark Twain

Andrew Breitbart is dead. The Earth is now a better place.

Like Twain, I don’t care much for gloating when a bad guy dies but in this case, Whoopee!

Gone, Baby, Gone

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Breitbart was a character assassin, an amoral ideologue, an agent provocateur, and, well, a dick of the highest order.

Here’s the difference between a warthog like Breitbart and a human being of decency. When Shirley Sherrod heard about his death, she said, “The news of Mr. Breitbart’s death came as a surprise to me when I was informed of it this morning. My prayers go out to Mr. Breitbart’s family as they cope during this very difficult time.”

Sherrod: A Gracious Victim

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This from a woman whose career serving in government was derailed by a phony-assed, maliciously edited video produced by none other than Mr. Breitbart.

And speaking of phony-assed, maliciously edited videos, it was Breitbart’s airing of the ACORN footage that led to that social service organization’s eventual bankruptcy and demise. Nice work, Andy-baby, pissing on all those folks who need food, housing, and legal services for your own professional advancement.

Naturally, the Republican candidates for president are mourning his passing as though a great public servant is gone from the scene. Rick Santorum calls his death a “huge loss, in my opinion, to our country.” Mitt Romney remembers him as a “loving husband and father.”

“Aw, He Was Such A Nice Guy.”

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Reminds me of when any notorious Outfit boss kicked the bucket back in Chicago. No matter that he’d been responsible for corrupting labor unions, forcing the Mob’s way into legitimate businesses, and murdering loan sharks, recalcitrant shopkeepers and potential witnesses, his neighbors would say he was such a nice guy and a real fine family man.

Hey, people, even A. Hitler was kind to his dog Blondi. That doesn’t excuse him for his evil acts.

Anyway, Breitbart — though not Hitler or a capo, but profoundly destructive in his own way — joins such luminaries as J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Curtis LeMay, and Lee Atwater in the pantheon of dead evil Americans.

It’s irrelevant that he was “a loving husband and father.”

“Welcome To Hell, Andy!”

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PAYING THE PIPER

Now that Mayor Mark Kruzan doesn’t have to worry about reelection for a while, he can level with Bloomington voters about the state of the city’s finances.

They ain’t good.

Kasey Husk of the Herald Times reports this morning that Kruzan says there are “dark clouds on the horizon” for us.

Potential Cover Shot For Bloomington’s Annual Financial Report

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The reason Kruzan waited until now to drop the bomb on us, apparently, is the potential that voters could have blamed him for the economic mess we’re in. That would have been stupid, of course, but then again no one ever accused the electorate, either here or nationally, of being remarkably brilliant.

Smart Enough To Know We’re Not All That Smart

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Hell, an entire major political party is fired up by proud anti-intellectualism. (I won’t even link to that party — you can guess which one I mean.)

So no, the city’s empty pockets aren’t Kruzan’s fault.

But we know where the blame primarily lies — all those clever, conniving, duplicitous investment banking house unindicted felons who played our economy for hundred of billions of dollars in fees and bonuses and left it dry.

Check out Michael Lewis’s book, “Liar’s Poker” for an early snapshot of the unregulated, greenback-worshipping, hyenas that populated Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street money-squeezers back in the mid- and late-80s.

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Not a one of those reprobates has ever served a minute in jail. Yet guys like Mark Kruzan have to worry that voters may turn on them because of the sins of Wall Street.

We can only hope there is a hell so that Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and the rest of their aiders and abettors can join Andrew Breitbart in it.

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IT’S ALL RELATIVE

With Russia’s presidential election three days away and Vladimir Putin looking like a shoo-in, we’re being inundated by news stories and commentary about what a despot the former KGB spook is. Deep thinkers are howling about how un-democratic the supposedly-now-democratic heart of the former Soviet Union is.
No doubt Putin’s goons have had “meetings” with dissenting journalists, his spies have added a dash of “strychnine” to the soup of neighboring pols or fed polonium pellets to expat whistle blowers, and his PR flacks are hard at work manipulating the minds of Russian couch potatoes.

That’s all true. Plus, Putin is such a charismatic tough guy that when he met the notoriously untraveled George W. Bush, this holy land’s president-at-the-time tumbled into a deep man-crush over him.

Putin Porn

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Yesterday, though, I caught another side of the story. Former IU writing professor Erlene Stetson and her husband visit us at the Book Corner nearly every day when they’re in town. Her husband was born in Germany and they keep homes in both countries.

The husband — whose name I never catch because we start talking about world events and history immediately, leaving little time for idle chit-chat and social niceties, so let’s call him Mr. Stetson — started ruminating about Putin and Russia.

“It is amazing,” Mr. Stetson said, “how things have changed in Russia.”

He was talking about the Russia of today vis-a-vis that of such sweethearts as Joseph Stalin and his successors.

Mr. Stetson pointed out that even if the Russian press and TV outlets are manipulated and intimidated now and again, they’re still a hundred-fold freer than the old state media apparatus was under the Communist General Secretaries.

He also says the recent mass protests against Putin and Russian voter fraud would never, ever have been tolerated in the Soviet days.

Russia, 2012

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Eastern Europeans of a certain generation view the new Russia in a state of near-awe these days, according to Mr. Stetson. Not that they envy Muscovites and the like, just that the relative relaxation of traditional Russian authoritarianism is so jarring in comparison to the bad old days.

Of course, it’s easy to look good when the object of comparison is a tyranny that, under Stalin, murdered tens of millions of people to maintain discipline, advance ideology, and just for the fun of it.

This reminds me of revisionist historians who decry the so-called Fathers of Our Country for owning slaves and treating women as decorative appendages.

White men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did indeed “own” human beings, including their lovely brides.

“Property”

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Viewed through today’s lens, Washington and Jefferson appear to be monsters.

In their own day, though, the framers of the US Constitution were the most progressive thinkers on the face of the Earth. They eschewed divine authority and legislated nobility out of existence. Yes, the only US citizens that counted were white male land-owners.

But that was a hell of a leap forward from previous social set-ups. We’ve been taking leaps in fits and starts ever since.

As the late, astute Molly Ivins once wrote, “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.”

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MERCEDES BENZ

“The Lord” and Money — perhaps this should be our national anthem.

♢

01/11/2012
2 Comments
Barack Obama, Book Corner, Boxcar Books, Christopher Morley, Dennis Kucinich, Elaine Irwin, George W. Bush, Howard Zinn, Jamie Dimon, Jerry Boyle, John McCain, Joy Division, Julia Karr, Lloyd Blankfein, New Order, Peter LoPilato, R.E. Paris, Rachel Maddow, Rockefeller Republican, Roe v. Wade, Ryder, Sarah Palin

The Pencil Today:

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TODAY’S QUOTE

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — Christopher Morley

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BARRY’S OKAY — JUST OKAY

I have no idea why but I feel I must defend Barack Obama these days — tepidly, of course, because his presidency has been rather ho-hum, for my money.

For all the excitement he generated among the commie, pinko, homo, abortion-crazed, tax-happy, put-the-white-man-in-jail, apologize-for-America, femi-nazi, Manchurian-candidate-cabalist population of this otherwise holy land when he was merely candidate Obama, Boss Obama’s reign has been pretty much a let down.

Every Right Winger’s Wet Nightmare

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Many of my lefty pals feel their blood pressure reach quadruple digits when the current POTUS is mentioned. The radical lawyer Jerry Boyle goes so far as to call him a “traitor” (to the left‘s cause — not, as the other side would have it, to the nation.)

How can a guy be a traitor when he was never part of the club?

If anybody had paid a bit of attention to how he voted when he was Senator Obama, they’d know he was, in truth, the biggest Rockefeller Republican since that very man who passed from this vale of tears at the age of 70 while banging his secretary on her desk back in 1977. (Yeah, yeah, I know — allegedly.)

The Original Rocky (Bust In The Senate Gallery)

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Anyway, as I’ve pontificated before, perhaps my happiest day as a voter and taxpayer in this greatest nation in the history of our corner of the Solar System was when Barack Obama was elected president. Not that I expected him to outlaw guns in cities, care for the sick, tend to the poor, pull the soldiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan the next day, and order the summary executions of Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, but because the election of a (half) black man demonstrated that these United States had grown up a bit since, oh say, the 1970s.

That and the fact that Obama wasn’t George W. Bush nor was he craven enough to have chosen as his running mate a MILF-y knucklehead from Alaska.

Every Right Winger’s Wet Dream

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The fact that Obama has surrounded himself with so many unindicted felons from the Goldman Sachs mob makes me want to retch. Then again, I never expected him to name among his advisers Dennis Kucinich, Howard Zinn, and Rachel Maddow.

So, that’s my roundabout way getting to the fact that I am categorically, incontrovertibly, without question or fail, voting for Barry come November. As long as nobody better comes along.

You think I want to see Roe v. Wade overturned? And all those Wall Street baboons given free reign? The privatization and profit-ization of basic human services? The digging for oil in every citizen’s backyard? Rush Limbaugh smiling?

Hell no, babies. I’m a staunch(ish) Obama man from here on out.

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TRUTH — REALLY

Bloomington author Julia Karr waltzed into the Book Corner Monday, carrying the galley copy of her forthcoming book, “Truth.”

It’s the follow-up to her successful 2011 release, “XVI,” a murder chiller set in a dystopian future.

‘Truth” will go on sale a week from tomorrow with a book release party Friday, January 20, at Boxcar Books.

Julia Karr

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Karr brought in “Truth” for our town’s Book Babe R.E. Paris, who’s reviewing it for Ryder magazine.

I was chatting with another customer at the time, a man whom I don’t know. When I told him he was in the presence of a big time pen lady and then told him about all the other successful authors in town, he said, “No kidding? I had had no idea this was such a center for authors.”

It is, pal. It is.

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BLOOMINGTON’S BOOK BABE LOOKS BACK AT 2011

Speaking of R.E. Paris, I mentioned yesterday that she looks at the year in publishing in the current issue of the Ryder. Peter LoPilato, the Ryder’s majordomo, has been kind enough to let us run selected pieces from the magazine in these precincts.

The Ryder

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So, let’s take a look at R.E.’s retrospective, no?

◗ 2011: The Year in Books, by R.E. Paris

In which I discuss some interesting titles from 2011, note others, and leave out yet many more worthy of mention among the hundreds of thousands of books published last year.

Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, (Norton), is a very readable history of the intellectual inheritance of the Renaissance. Greenbaltt shows that history ties the modern world to the classical one…. read more

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TRUE FAITH

New Order was born of Joy Division after that band’s lead singer committed suicide. Joy Divison had led the post-punk movement in the late 1970s and New Order took the sound to a new level with its incorporation of then-new electronic technology.

And, BTW, New Order has a bit of a Bloomington connection. The video for “Round & Round” featured the face of super-model and recent local divorcee Elaine Irwin (go to the 3:15 mark.)

Elaine Irwin Decorates New Order’s “Round & Round” Video

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Anyway, here’s “True Faith”:

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