The Giveaway of Giveaways
    The Connecticut state budget for the upcoming year is $20.5 billion. That’s walking around money for Bridgewater Associates of Westport, Connecticut, reckoned to be the biggest and most profitable hedge fund and money manager in the universe. Richer than God, as they say.
    Bridgewater disposes over $120 billion in assets, or six times  CT’s budget.  Last year, Bridgewater paid Ray Dalio, its founding partner, $3.9 billion. That’s enough to tip every Connecticit resident a grand and still leave $400 million for Mr. Dalio to scrape by on.     
     Connecticut is a solidly liberal state. The governor is a Dem and the Dems dominate both legislative houses. Reps are rare and tea baggers are strictly from Liptons. So you might think, that with such leadership, Connecticut would be giving the little guys a break and letting the big guys fend for themselves. Think again.
    You may then gulp at the news that Governor Malloy is taking millions from education and social services to give to Bridgewater. That’s $115 million, to be precise, to be transferred from taxpayer to titan. And this while slashing state services to cover a $365 million budget shortfall. Though my better half says that the analogy is not quite apt, I say that’s like donating your wedding ring to Tiffany’s to help with their bottom line. 
    The next time you move to a different town within Connecticut, you might ask the governor to pay the movers.  That’s, in effect, what he’s doing for Bridgewater. It has outgrown its Westport headquarters and says it needs a lot more room to store its ever increasing mountain of money bags. The taxpayers’ hundred mill is to help the hedgie settle into ampler digs with water views in Stamford, which just happens to be Malloy's hometown
    According to the gov, the payoff for Connecticut will be a thousand new jobs at Bridgewater over the next decade. That assumes that the markets remain buoyant. Otherwise there may be a thousand fewer jobs. But that hardly matters.  Private companies always promise to use public largesse to hire people. I have never heard of a single instance in which a company’s failure to do so was even noticed, let alone sanctioned.
   For decades now, the main business of this country has been transferring wealth from the poor and middling classes to the richest of the wealthy class. The Bridgewater deal couldn’t be a more shameless example of this.

KARMAN ON THE RADIO FRIDAY
I was pleased over the holidays to be a guest of my old pal Mike DeRose on his New Focus radio program out of Hartford.  Stations and listening times are as following:

WWUH (91.3FM) or www.wwuh.org (U of Hartford): Friday @ 12 Noon and Tues @ 8:30PM.

WHUS (91.7FM) or www.whus.org (UConn):  Friday @ 5PM.

WESU (88.1FM) or www.wesufm.org (Wesleyan U): Monday @ 1:30PM.

Stay Tuned
      When your nightly news team signs off at 11:30 pm, they remind you to stay tuned for the morning news starting at 5 am. There you will get a another reminder to watch the noon news, where you’ll be teased (that’s the word they use in the business) to glom onto the evening news beginning at 5 p.m. And so the cycle goes.
    The business of tv is to deliver the most possible eyeballs to advertisers. So the stations want you to sit in front of the vidiot box 24/7. This desire is obviously at odds with the sponsors who want you to get off the couch and go out to buy the stuff they’re peddling.  This contradiction is well on its way to being solved thanks to online shopping that allows you to sit and spend at the same time.
    When the weather turns foul, or there is yet another massacre of innocents, the tv stops telling you to watch the next newscast. Instead, it wants you on round-the-clock tenterhooks anxiously awaiting the upcoming update, alert, flash, extra, late-breaking bulletin, special report and/or exclusive interview. If you actually obeyed the dicta of these giant media corporations, your family and friends would soon become people you never hear from anymore.
    By the same token, if in this Christmas season you attempted to consume everything tv told you to consume, you would become obese, insane, insolvent and doomed to a terrible death. In short, the flat screen flattens you.  The more of it you take in, the sicker and stupider you become. 
    Interestingly, though we almost all watch tv and interconnect with the internet, the polls and surveys tell us that we mistrust the media and abominate the commercialization of everything from holy masses to unholy massacres. It’s all money now say the seniors, sad over the loss of the America they knew before the market and the media disappeared citizens and replaced them with globalized consumers buying the same junk in Hong Kong or Hartford.
   Yes, it is all money now.  But fewer and fewer Americans have enough of it to make a decent life, let alone heed the marketing orders delivered by the boob tube.  Will we ever pull ourselves away from the latest update and begin evening things up? 

Cliff Note
Stop biting your nails. The "fiscal cliff" is a fraud worthy of Bernie Madoff. For a cogent briefing on what it’s all about by a Wall Streeter and a Republican economist (both of them erstwhile), I highly recommend Bill Moyers' show from last Sunday.  Don’t miss it. Here's a link:  Over the Cliff.  

Too Big To Jail
 It is cunning to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases---attributed to Schiller  
    Boy, do I have a bank deal for you. Guaranteed, too. You scam some mark out of a hundred grand. In the unlikely event you get caught, you’re allowed to negotiate the fine you’ll pay. It’s more like a tip. Ten large should do it. Jail? Don’t worry, it’ll never happen--even if you keep running the same scam over and over.
    Neither will your reputation suffer. The media have been trained to soft pedal offenses like this not as the crimes they are, but rather as “mistakes,” “lapses,” and “inadvertencies” that can be rectified by tightening book-keeping procedures:  “Oh, did we misplace a billion or so? I’ll check with accounting.”
   In short, instead of suffering punishment and shame, you’re more likely to end up playing golf with President Obama at Mink Meadows on Martha’s Vineyard.
    To be honest, there has to be a lot more zeros behind that hundred thousand to qualify for such de luxe treatment.  So if you’ve cooked the books at Hoopleville Bank & Trust--get lost, this is not in your league! This is available only to masters of the universe from UBS (The president's pet), Barclay’s, HSBC, Citibank, Bank of America and the like.
    This week brought us another example of this scam in action. The Obama administration and HSBC, one of the world’s biggest and baddest banks, reached a deal by which the bank would escape justice for, among other crimes, laundering money for Mexican drug cartels, by paying Uncle Sam a fine equal to a fraction of its yearly profits (By the by, these fines are rarely paid in full, but negotiated even further down after the publicity dies down.
    The stink was so bad that in a lead editorial the NY Times called the deal “a dark day for the rule of law.” “Clearly, added the editorial, 'the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail.”
    This is the latest of the extra-constitutional precedents being set by our president, who was once a professor of constitutional law.  Among other prominent ones was his declaration that he could kill anyone anywhere just on his own say-so--and the hell with the Constitution and even the Magna Carta. Then there was his novel reasoning that war crimes didn’t have to be prosecuted since they happened in the past. (I guess we should only try future crimes or those happening right now. That would certainly relieve jail crowding.) And, of course, his Libya claim that not only could he declare war on his own in direct violation of Section 8 of the Constitution, but that he didn’t even have to inform Congress.
    Welcome to Obamaland, where you can get away with murder and money and still be loved by liberals.

Through The Looking Glass  
      The rabbit ears long ago became refuse. The roof antenna rusted out and ended up in the dump. Ditto for your cordless phone that looked like a WWII walkie-talkie. It’s all cable and wireless now.
      So, all-powerful American consumer, take your pick of plans. Plan A  gives you cable, phone and internet by way of the single company in your town. If you want a certain channel, say the frog racing channel, you also have to buy the Latvian cooking channel, and a lot of other channels you don’t want. That's because they’re bundled for your operator's economic enjoyment. Your phone is only good for the U.S; a call to Toronto will cost a bundle. And finally your internet clip-clops instead of galloping. The freight: $150 a month.
    Plan B is a little different.  You get a choice of dozens of cable operators to sign with. The number of channels they carry is brain-boggling--everything from Mongolian yak husbandry to
Panamanian porn. Your phone works for 70 countries. Internet speed is ten times that offered in Plan A. The charge: $38 a month. And you can change carriers anytime.
    But you don't really have a choice. Plan A is what we get in the free-market United States.  Plan B is for France and the other socialistic countries of Europe. Of course, you might be saying at this point that it looks like the Europeans have the real free market while we have local monopolies.
    But, as the cable industry and their friendly regulators in the government will tell you, it only appears so. Competition doesn’t have to be local or for the same customers.  As long as there are at least two cable companies in the country, it’s assumed that their mere existence means they compete and therefore that the cable market is a free one.  And even if we get down to one cable company for the whole country, charging a thousand bucks a week for b&w reception, a rotary dial phone and a 56K modem, that will still be a triumph of the American free market system since foreign cable companies will be deemed competitors.  As they say in the splendidly lucrative cable business, it’s all in the way you look at things.

Donations for Dummies
    Last Sunday morning, NPR interviewed some poor sap because he donated fifty bucks to help pay off the national debt. His uninformed contribution was part of a puff piece about how the Treasury had received $7.7 million in such gifts so far this year from like-minded lightweights.
    Stories like this keep popping up. I remember an iteration a while back in which the well-meaning widow of a Connecticut university president suggested bake sales to aid in our arrears.
    If we lived in a land with honest media, you would expect them to use such occasions to educate Americans about the debt. The NPR reporter could have begun by explaining that the national debt is not the same as a payday loan. Instead, it's a financial product that’s bought and sold around the clock around the world. Or by noting that some of those who trade the debt ‘own’ their piece of it for the instant it now takes to make or lose money on it.
    Governments have two ways of raising money: by taxes and by borrowing. Taxes are the fairest and most efficient way---if you can get everyone to pay them. Borrowing is basically unfair since it shifts wealth from tax payers to those who lend money to the government.  Those creditors want government to borrow ever more money because that enriches and enlarges the credit markets.  Should the debt be magically paid in full tomorrow morning, those markets would collapse and Wall Street would blow away as if hit by a dozen Hurricane Sandys at once.
    The soaring increase in our national debt parallels the explosion of all sorts of debt. We used to make money by making stuff, now we make it by borrowing, buying, lending, leasing, selling and swapping a bewildering variety of financial paper, some of which carries the imprint of the U.S. Treasury. This endless production of debt, otherwise known as financial services, has become the biggest of our big businesses.  
    The market in U.S. debt is only one of the countless economic mechanisms designed to make the richest of the rich richer and send the rest of us to gobbing gruel at the poor farm.  This has reached a point where the top one percent have as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Even Warren Buffett thinks that's suicidal for capitalism. As a result we’re heading, and quickly, in the direction of the feudal banana republics where a few families own everything worth owning in the country.
    So a well-meaning economic simpleton making a donation to lower the national debt is in effect handing a penny to Abdullah, king of the Saudis, or, worse, Donald Trump. That NPR takes debt donors seriously only shows how unserious it is.

Less For More
       It  used to be that if you paid less you got junk and if you paid more you got quality. No more. Now the trend is toward astronomically priced dreck. Herewith a couple of examples:
    The word is out that our recent election cost six billion bucks, enough money to fund 20 minutes of war in Waziristan. Much of that moolah was used to inflict a million tv spots on us in the most awful and annoying waste of air time since the devil created public broadcasting fund drives.
    Ever since our betters poured that six bil down the bowl, the talking heads have been belatedly discovering that very few, if any, serious issues were brought up in the platinum-plated campaign. Of course, the same talking heads were chief among those who at the time made the important trivial and the trivial important.
    So the example that the self-proclaimed leader of the free world is setting is that for a ridiculous amount of money you can pit two corporate clones against each other to bloviate about nothing much and call it democracy. I’m sure lots of people in all those un-greatest countries will jump at the chance to model themselves on us.
    On the same note, but with far larger numbers, is our multi-trillion dollar disgrace without honor now being celebrated from Mesopotamia to the Hindu Kush. You would think that with unlimited bucks and gung-ho spirit to spare, the world’s most extravagant military might just justify itself by winning a war now and then--especially since it has seemingly restricted itself to battling medieval tribes people.  But, like elections where you actually tackle public issues, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
    If the above cited horrors are making you sick, you might add to your miseries by considering, yet again, our health care system.  I was reminded of it after getting a statement from Medicare containing a charge of $15,426 for my most recent cardiac catheterization. Of course, I won’t pay anything out of pocket and Medicare will cough up only a fraction of it.  That’s the amount that any of the nearly 50 million Americans without health care would have to pay.
    As I noted in this space on several occasions, the same catheterization in France some years back was billed at $1,300.  If we took our politics seriously and stopped spending like Plutus to make war on Pushtoons, maybe we could have affordable health care for everyone. Nah.

On Wasting Votes
    The good folks of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York reelected Barack Obama with 2.6 million more votes than he needed to win. If just 260,000, or ten percent, of them had gone to a progressive third party, such as the Greens, we’d be on the road to making better politics and a more decent country for ourselves.  Instead, progressives can expect little besides business as usual in return for burying Obama in ballots. Talk about waste.

Where Have All The Winners Gone?
    A long time ago, generals who won wars were celebrated and those who lost them were relegated. Not so much anymore.  American-style war has become so commercialized that winning or losing is secondary to operating the military as a corporate profit center. Thus, an officer who maneuvers smartly through the executive suites can now make a mark as a leader without much in the way of martial triumphs.
    That’s the case with Gen. David Petraeus, freshly resigned from  running the CIA over a sexual peccadillo. No general since World War II had a more spectacular career or was more praised by one and all. Even his demit by scandal was used by the media to heap further laurels on him. But unlike Eisenhower of D-Day fame or Montgomery of El Alemein, there’s no great battle associated with Petraeus. At most, he’s noted for the “surge” in Iraq, which in the end amounted to bribing the Sunnis not to attack U.S.forces. Nothing our military has tried in that part of the world has worked out, so Obama tells us we're shifting our sights to targets in Asia.  Meanwhile, in all of the encomiums to Petraeus, one word is missing: victory.
    By the by, the Patraeus imbroglio reminded me of Tim Weiner’s informative, “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”  Weiner, a former national security correspondent for the NY Times, tells us that J. Edgar Hoover vociferously opposed the creation of the CIA because it would cut into the turf of his FBI.  In the decades since, according to Weiner, it’s been all but bloody war between the two agencies. I can’t help wondering whether the downfall of Petraeus by way of an FBI investigation is yet another skirmish in the battle of the bureaucracies? 

So, Now What?
    With elections over, we remain with two conservative parties, one hard and the other mushy, agreed on the course of the economy and the empire. The hard Reps, unable to overcome their debilitating chauvinism in a country becoming ever more diverse, are fading. The mushy Dems, by offering voters an acceptance of that diversity and not much more, are holding their own.
    The campaign of Obama and the Dems proffered only cough drops and band-aids for our awful problems. Even the old Dem rhetoric promising succor to the poor and working classes was abandoned in favor of brainless bathetics like “Forward.” Their message was, “we won’t screw you as badly as the Reps will--unless, of course, our bankster buddies make us do it.”
    Among progressives there are those who believe that Obama will now betray his Wall Street mentors and financiers and start spreading the wealth instead of concentrating it. They also expect him to somehow provide jobs, eschew new wars, get serious about the environment, and generally act more like Franklin Roosevelt than Herbert Hoover. Some even say they’re willing to “pressure” him to do so. That’s not going to happen because they have no pressure to apply.  Why should Obama heed progressives who automatically heel to him and the corrupt, business-as-usual Dems?
    My guess is that Obama will enjoy a pleasant four years of non pareil perks and self regard.  With a GOP Congress staring scimitars at him, he’ll be able to talk about all the great things he'd do if only John (When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking) Boehner would let him. No doubt, he’ll spend many hours considering the splendid offers of corporate directorships and speaking fees he’ll be getting  after 2016 as rewards for his service to his betters. He should soon be as flush as Al Gore and Bill Clinton.
    Unless the country has gone totally brain dead, resistance will grow as the rest of us become immiserated to make the fat cats sleeker. The only hope for the success of such such a movement in bringing a new direction to the country will be if it becomes massive, strong and clever.  The time to start building it is today. Unless you’ve got something better to do.

Unemployment Solved!

    Finishing up school and need a job? There’s a business growing faster than a pig can fly. And it’s hiring millions of grads right now. These jobs feature ultra-high salaries, full health benefits, reimbursement of tuition debt, free luxury housing in desirable resort areas, and  unlimited no-charge use of new Lexuses, Range Rovers and, in many cases, Corvettes. Act soon and you may even be driving a Ferrari.
    What is this incredible new business?           

    Fact checking!     

    Right now and right here, there have never been so many liars in one place in the whole history of the universe. You would have thought that with the electoral campaigns almost over, there would be a sharp decrease in fakery and fabulation.  Quite the opposite.  People are taking their cues from politicians and have begun to palter to a fare-thee-well.  For instance, dentists are lying about the number of cavities they fill while the cable company is claiming that you did order the Latvian premium channel.  

     Each and every day countless canards are created, each of which has to be checked and then indexed and sent to cloud storage. A proposed Constitutional amendment that will entitle Americans to their own facts is expected to raise the boom in fact checking to new heights. Don’t miss out on this great opportunity.

(The above article has been fact-checked by the firm of Bugiardo Mentiroso and Lugner and has been rated  TL--Tissue of Lies)

Tough Tooties
  Polls tell us that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is by far the most popular pol in the country. People think she’s doing a crackerjack job of running foreign policy. Then again, polls say that Americans don’t give a Chihuahua’s turd about foreign policy.
    Now, just because we’re not interested in the other 95 percent of humanity with their un-American ways and historical sob stories, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get tough with them. Especially at election time. As Willard Romney promises, he'll  “shape” the world to fit our "interests."
    He'll do that with "leadership." Unless you’re a foreign policy maven, you may not know about the Great Global Ballot of 1999 (or was it 1899?) in which 99.7 percent of the people on earth voted the U.S. and whoever happens to be its president as their permanent leader. Anti-American troublemakers say that’s just a fabulated crock. But even if they’re right, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t drone them.
    At the risk of making us instantly cop z's in front of the flat screen, Barry Obama and Willard Romney spent 90 minutes Monday night debating the best ways to get tough with all those foreigners we lead.  That’s about 88 minutes more than most Americans can tolerate on that subject.     
     In case you slumbered through it, my favorite moment was delivered by Romney.  After forcefully dictating to Iran and China, and after strongly criticizing Barry for weak dictation, Willard put the cherry on the lemon and lie pie by emphatically denying that the U.S. dictates to other countries.
    My second favorite was when Barry and Willard kept one-upping about who wants to “strangle” Iran more. Perhaps they had forgotten in the excitement of the campaign that “strangling” countries was an act of war and, indeed, a war crime. 
    Well, no matter. Happily, we won’t have to bother ourselves about foreign policy for another four years. Then, in 2016, some presidential hopeful, maybe even Hillary, can warn that the Iranians are eight years closer to getting a bomb.