Sunday, January 31, 2010

Davos Skinny-Dips

Midnite before the final session
of Davos world economic forum:

Big bankers are invited to skinnydip
in the heated olympic swimming-pool
in the (unnamed) grandest hotel
after its heat is turned off.

After an hour of uncomfortably
comparing genitalia, they realize
it’s gotten chillier, but none
dares admit it as the chill raises
their visible expectations.

Peckers stand up, balls harden,
coughing rebounds off tile walls.
The first one to climb out loses
a place in the lockeroom queue,
a warm shower, warm towel,
clean clothes in the lockerroom,
floors below, valet parking for
their limo full of Swiss chocolate.

Who wins? Ask around, after
compensating chattering teeth.

(01 FEB 10, Santa Clara CA)v2
In memoriam, Lee R. Baxandall
(26 JAN 1935 - 28 NOV 2008)

DAVOS IS SO SORRY

"Get it wrong one way
& we risk a new crisis;
get it wrong the other way
& we'll take the steam
out of the recovery
& reduce the chances
of creating new jobs,"

The right balance must be struck
"between making a safer banking system
& a financial system that can support
the sort of dynamism & growth
in job creation." Everyone must have
"a degree of humility about what
we actually know, & how confident
we can be that the ideas
we're going to put in place
are going to have the consequences
that we thought they were going to have….

Tho discussions were "very constructive"
"They haven't (in a sense) solved the issues,
but they certainly, I think, pushed them forward."

- Peter Sands, CEO
Standard Chartered Bank

Muhammad Yunus,
managing director
of Grameen (microcredit) Bank:

"This is a good time to redesign
the entire financial system.
Big guys are not the big sufferers.
Big sufferers are the small guys
who lost their jobs,
who lost their food,
who lost their livelihood."

(01 FEB 10)v1

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Free 2B Corporate

FREE TO BE CORPOR@TE
"…the Senator from Du Pont Chemicals with his 45 votes…the Senator from Nash-Kelvinator with his 6." Pohl & Kornbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952/3) pp.13-14


Money talks. Politics c@lls:
“Steve, I need to know where
what’s left of GM stands on this.”
“I hope you’re recording this,”
asks GM Senator Steve Steeves.
“Yes, I am,” says UAW Senator
Paul ‘Polack’ Propulski. Silence;
neither realizes they’re tapped
by Ford Senator Henry Ford IV
who thinks “Those jerks don’t
realize all this is legal now” with
corporate masters humanized,
according to SCOTUS, free to
exercise 1st-amendment rights.
“Speak up, you 2!” says Ford,
breaking their cautious silence,
"Be freemen in a freecorpor@te
world. You're finally free! Now,
let's work us a corpor@te deal.”

(30 JAN 10, Santa Clara CA)v4

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Jerry Salinger

Jerome David Salinger (January 1, 1919 NYC – January 27, 2010 Cornish NH) died yesterday at 91. Everyone tells the same empty Salinger story: recluse for the last 50+ years in NH, published almost nothing new in the past 50 yrs. Famewise, he didn't have to after THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951) [which I've never read]; but eventually didn't want to, or so it appears.

Read his Wikipedia listing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger for his mid-life obsessions (mainly Hinduish) & his distressed relations with much younger women, some of whom he married.

All I can add is that a Roman Catholic friend of mine now in her 70s says she dated him while in college & always refers to him as "Jerry", but reveals nothing personal between them. One wife & his only daughter, however, wrote painful memoirs.

Literati are now speculating about whether there are any unpublished Salinger mss. stored in a vault somewhere, like Hemingway (whom he met in the US Army during WW2.) There are.

(28 JAN 2010, Santa Clara CA)v3

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

A roof over

(for Karl Kadie)


Stories of homeless people
expose our disordered society,
but not its golden chain dangling
from Greenspan’s aynrandian peak
to Howard Jarvis' flat-taxian plain
& the disagora of realtors & bankers
enticing money-fiction fractioneers.

Will adequate housing ever become reality,
vs a speculatable commodity? Not while
free-market capitalism cons all too many
into believing that people can take care
of themselves if only they try hard enuf.

Free-market capitalism's operative fiction is:
free-will & freedom of opportunity magically
distribute everything that everyone needs.

A roof over one's head is given to most dogs,
but not most people, proving dogs outrank
people as desirable. Should homeless people
learn to breed less, roll over, become servile?

(13 JAN 10, Santa Clara CA)v5

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Going Nowhere

For every Republican Senator
bought by for-profit health-care,
another Democratic Senator
is soully-owned by R.C. bishops.

Obama’s progress slows down;
after a few more defections,
this country will surely regress.
Hurry up! Call 911-Emergency!


(09 JAN 10, Santa Clara CA)v2