Every time I turn around I see or hear someone jabbering into a cell phone. Everyone’s talking, talking, talking, but I wonder if anyone is listening. Talk is cheap and easy; listening takes effort and concentration, and in this nano-second age who has time for that? No, we’ve got to keep our game on, 24/7, win the point, the debate, the argument or the match and there simply isn’t time for understanding.
So, standing in line at the drug store, waiting to pay for a prescription that would be free in England and costs $40 here, I’m listening to the guy in front of me talking to someone – his girlfriend, I presume – about his thoroughly crappy day, which started with him dropping his Starbucks in the gutter when he tripped over a sleeping homeless person. I won’t repeat his opinion of homeless people or what should be done with them, but it’s the same fate that befalls stray dogs when nobody claims them from the shelter.
Then I get home and Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, a player I love to hate because he never produces for the Yanks in the clutch, is talking to Peter Gammons from ESPN about his use of “Performance Enhancing Drugs,” or PED’s as they’re called, when he, Rodriguez, was with the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez, recipient of an obscenely large multi-year contract from the Rangers, felt enormous pressure to prove that he was worth it, and with the MLB culture being what it was at that time – with just about every name player ingesting, mainlining or rubbing their muscles with magic cream – what could A-Rod do but join the parade to the trainer’s office, the counter at GNC, or the trunk of some pharmaceutical rep’s Buick? Under those loosey-goosey circumstances, not to mention the strength-sapping heat of Arlington, Texas in August, how could A-Rod have stuck to the straight, narrow and honest path? A-Rod couldn’t specify what he took or exactly how he obtained what he took, but he was sorry for his fans, the game of baseball which has made him richer than Midas, and all the kids out there who idolize him. Biting his lower lip like a 3rd grader in the principal’s office, A-Rod said he just wants to turn the page and do all he can to win a World Series for New York. “And you’ve been clean since 2003?” asks Gammons. “As a hounds tooth,” replies A-Rod, and we’re supposed to believe him.
Which is sort of like believing that George W. Bush read more than one book a year or that Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, cares more about taxpayers than he does about his cronies in the finance industry. Lying used to be something of an art, but like listening, lying has gone the way of Honor, Fidelity and the Sony Walkman.
Geithner doesn’t believe the Federal Government should ask too much of finance executives for fear that the executives won’t play ball, but isn’t this scenario closer to the truth: the balance sheets of so many American banks are so negatively lopsided by an orgy of speculation, greed, and gross mismanagement, that the banks have no choice but to play by whatever rules the Government demands?
The public clearly wants harsher penalties and more accountability from the recipients of Federal funds, but when the fox is standing guard at the henhouse door, which is what always comes to pass in America, what the public wants is irrelevant, even though it’s our money being tossed down the septic tank that Wall Street has become.
When Obama surrounded himself with Robert Rubin, Geithner and Larry Summers, I knew the deal was done and that nothing much was going to change on the economic front. Don’t get me wrong, even surrounded by some of the same people who helped sever the connection between banking fundamentals and real assets valued realistically, ushering in the great Ponzi Scheme that our economy was until it imploded last fall, Obama is better than the Bush/Cheney junta.
But let’s cut the endless e-mail and text messages from the Obama Machine, telling us how different things are now that Barack is in the Oval Office. Yes, the style is different, better, but the substance hasn’t changed – it’s just been re-arranged on the big conference table in Wall Street’s Board Room.
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