Finding bad reasons for what
on instinct we choose to believe,
philosophy rescues from rot
the thoughts we’d do better to leave
behind us, not searching for reasons
why some things seem true, and some don’t;
philosophy changes like seasons,
and we quite instinctively don’t.
Inspired by an article by Rabbi David Wolpe in the Septemeber issue of Commentary, where joins Jonathan D. Sarna, Michael MedvedWilliam Kristol, Jeff Jacoby and David Gelernter in a discussion, “Why Are Jews Liberals?” Wolpe suggests that the answer is because Jews vote their self-conception, identifying themselves with those on the margins and seeing themselves as arrivistes.” He writes:Politics is full of arguments, yet how many arrive at their politics through argument? While it may not quite British idealist F.H. Bradley’s definition of philosophy as the “finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct,” there remains a large reside of instinct in political alignments.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/24/09
Monday, August 24, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
rising tide
RISING TIDE
They used to say a rising tide
could lift all boats, and making those
who’re rich more rich would help provide
the poor not just with food and clothes,
but things we all enjoy like cars,
vacations, ladies. Although Gatsby
envied Tom Buchanan, he
thought he’d, with friends who’re fat cats, be
raised with a fat cat to the sea,
like Owl, wrapped in a five-pound note,
when sailing with a Pussy-Cat
in a lovely pea green boat.
Marrying, the Owl and Cat
danced, lit by silver of the moon,
but life for us won’t be like that,
for, dancing to the piper’s tune,
we’ll have to pay him soon, because
the rich themselves are getting poorer,
and there’s no Wizard now in Oz
who’s capable to be our Fuehrer––
not that we’d want one, God forbid!
We all prefer, like King Canute,
to think we can control the tide,
as we our treasury now loot,
from reality to hide.
We’ll make all differences dissolve
between the rich and poor since we
will all be poor as we evolve,
responding to calamity
by finding turkeys who will marry us
with rings that cost less than one shilling
because we bought them at cost-plus,
washed up in tides of bail-out billing.
Inspired by an article, “Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall,” by David Leonhardt and and Geraldine Fabrikant in the NYT, August 21, 2009:
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality. But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon. For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/21/09
They used to say a rising tide
could lift all boats, and making those
who’re rich more rich would help provide
the poor not just with food and clothes,
but things we all enjoy like cars,
vacations, ladies. Although Gatsby
envied Tom Buchanan, he
thought he’d, with friends who’re fat cats, be
raised with a fat cat to the sea,
like Owl, wrapped in a five-pound note,
when sailing with a Pussy-Cat
in a lovely pea green boat.
Marrying, the Owl and Cat
danced, lit by silver of the moon,
but life for us won’t be like that,
for, dancing to the piper’s tune,
we’ll have to pay him soon, because
the rich themselves are getting poorer,
and there’s no Wizard now in Oz
who’s capable to be our Fuehrer––
not that we’d want one, God forbid!
We all prefer, like King Canute,
to think we can control the tide,
as we our treasury now loot,
from reality to hide.
We’ll make all differences dissolve
between the rich and poor since we
will all be poor as we evolve,
responding to calamity
by finding turkeys who will marry us
with rings that cost less than one shilling
because we bought them at cost-plus,
washed up in tides of bail-out billing.
Inspired by an article, “Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall,” by David Leonhardt and and Geraldine Fabrikant in the NYT, August 21, 2009:
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality. But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon. For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/21/09
Thursday, August 20, 2009
cash for clunkers
Ford Motor Company asked Marianne Moore
to think up names for their brand new cars.
Agreeing to be automobile whore,
she couldn’t give them branded jaguars,
already taken, so Ford Fabergé,
Astranaut, Utopian Turtletop,
were names that she proposed to them, but they
declined as names for which no one would shop.
The situation’s changed now, since we pay
for clunkers cash. Like roses’ other names,
they all smell sweet. It’s not their sobriquet
that counts, but how much gas burns in their flames,
besides whicfh, names reminding us of bed sell
best, and Marianne Moore was too straitlaced:
the name they chose instead of hers’ was Edsel.
Like cars, a poet’s mind may go to waste!
.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate and the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House,” writes about Marianne Moore’s attempt to help the Ford Motor Company sell cars by finding names for them (“Poetry in Motion,” NYT, August 16, 2009):
IT seems that we’ve done just about everything to get the American auto industry out of the doldrums. We’ve forced bankruptcies. We’ve exchanged cash for clunkers. But have we tried poetry? The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s unofficial poet laureate. Moore, who died in 1972, was at the height of her literary powers in the autumn of 1955, when a letter arrived in her Brooklyn mailbox.A Ford executive wrote that the company was launching “a rather important new series of cars,” but his team was stumped to think of a name for the latest product line. Could Moore, an icon of American letters, help them out?
Moore embraced the assignment with relish, not surprising for a poet who enjoyed — and whose writing was frequently inspired by — popular culture, whether it be baseball, boxing or bric-a-brac. The correspondence became a cultural fixture of its own after it was published in The New Yorker two years later. Throughout the fall and winter of 1955, Moore’s steady stream of suggestions arrived at Ford: “the Ford Silver Sword,” “Intelligent Bullet,” “the Ford Fabergé,” “Mongoose Civique,” “Anticipator,” “Pastelogram,” “Astranaut” and, the highest flight of fancy, “Utopian Turtletop.”
Moore apparently had no qualms about enlisting her muse in the service of the automotive industry. She was also willing to embrace the risks of the marketplace, agreeing to be paid only if she came up with a winning name. As Moore’s biographer Charles Molesworth points out, she “had always enjoyed the language of advertisement, delighting in its inventiveness and ebullience, and even relating it to the poetics of praise.”
These days, poetry and commerce are rarely on such good speaking terms. Poetry doesn’t sell well, and poets almost never attain the celebrity that touched Moore, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg half a century ago. If some Detroit executive got the bright idea to consult a poet for marketing advice today, one rather doubts he’d know whom to call.It’s nice to think that the two groups — poets and carmakers — might find new relevance through collaboration, but history is not encouraging. After much thought, Ford Motors politely rejected all of Moore’s lyrical suggestions for its new car line. Instead, the company’s executives opted for a choice generated internally: the Edsel.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/16/09
to think up names for their brand new cars.
Agreeing to be automobile whore,
she couldn’t give them branded jaguars,
already taken, so Ford Fabergé,
Astranaut, Utopian Turtletop,
were names that she proposed to them, but they
declined as names for which no one would shop.
The situation’s changed now, since we pay
for clunkers cash. Like roses’ other names,
they all smell sweet. It’s not their sobriquet
that counts, but how much gas burns in their flames,
besides whicfh, names reminding us of bed sell
best, and Marianne Moore was too straitlaced:
the name they chose instead of hers’ was Edsel.
Like cars, a poet’s mind may go to waste!
.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate and the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House,” writes about Marianne Moore’s attempt to help the Ford Motor Company sell cars by finding names for them (“Poetry in Motion,” NYT, August 16, 2009):
IT seems that we’ve done just about everything to get the American auto industry out of the doldrums. We’ve forced bankruptcies. We’ve exchanged cash for clunkers. But have we tried poetry? The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s unofficial poet laureate. Moore, who died in 1972, was at the height of her literary powers in the autumn of 1955, when a letter arrived in her Brooklyn mailbox.A Ford executive wrote that the company was launching “a rather important new series of cars,” but his team was stumped to think of a name for the latest product line. Could Moore, an icon of American letters, help them out?
Moore embraced the assignment with relish, not surprising for a poet who enjoyed — and whose writing was frequently inspired by — popular culture, whether it be baseball, boxing or bric-a-brac. The correspondence became a cultural fixture of its own after it was published in The New Yorker two years later. Throughout the fall and winter of 1955, Moore’s steady stream of suggestions arrived at Ford: “the Ford Silver Sword,” “Intelligent Bullet,” “the Ford Fabergé,” “Mongoose Civique,” “Anticipator,” “Pastelogram,” “Astranaut” and, the highest flight of fancy, “Utopian Turtletop.”
Moore apparently had no qualms about enlisting her muse in the service of the automotive industry. She was also willing to embrace the risks of the marketplace, agreeing to be paid only if she came up with a winning name. As Moore’s biographer Charles Molesworth points out, she “had always enjoyed the language of advertisement, delighting in its inventiveness and ebullience, and even relating it to the poetics of praise.”
These days, poetry and commerce are rarely on such good speaking terms. Poetry doesn’t sell well, and poets almost never attain the celebrity that touched Moore, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg half a century ago. If some Detroit executive got the bright idea to consult a poet for marketing advice today, one rather doubts he’d know whom to call.It’s nice to think that the two groups — poets and carmakers — might find new relevance through collaboration, but history is not encouraging. After much thought, Ford Motors politely rejected all of Moore’s lyrical suggestions for its new car line. Instead, the company’s executives opted for a choice generated internally: the Edsel.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/16/09
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
transcendence
Like Leonard Cohen I may sing about
transcendence, but I don’t endorse it.
Inhibited by devastating doubt,
which is the skeptic scholar's corset,
I soar towards the sun and the supernal,
but tend to be too temperamental
to focus on what’s labeled as eternal,
and temporize, untranscendental.
Unlike Leonard’s gift my own, though golden,
was not a singer’s velvet voice.
To unsung words I’ve always been beholden,
and neither Carnegie nor Royce
have halls where verses unaccompanied
by instruments like a guitar
or piano draw the audiences I need
to validate my verse, as noir
as Leonard’s, and emerging from the same
Judaic sources we endorse.
Not wild—in fact I’d say extremely tame—
about the transcendental force,
I try to make the point that life must be
experienced without expectation
that we should wait for what we cannot see,
transcendent causes for elation.
Inspired by an article on Leonard Cohen in the New Yorker by Sasha Frere-Jones (“State of Grace: Leonard Cohen’s Return,” August 24, 2009):
Over the past forty years, Cohen’s songs have been covered so often they’ve become their own cottage industry. Aretha Franklin, Jarvis Cocker, Philip Glass, Will Oldham, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nina Simone, Willie Nelson, Françoise Hardy, Anthony Michael Hall, Bob Dylan, Rufus Wainwright, and the Whiffenpoofs have all recorded Cohen songs. During the fourth week of December of last year, two versions of Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—one by Jeff Buckley and one by Alexandra Burke, a winning contestant on the British talent show “X Factor”—occupied the No. 1 and No. 2 slots on the U.K. charts. Cohen’s lyrics stand up in a variety of settings, and his limited vocal range tends to leave his melodies unfinished, allowing room for experimentation. On Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” for instance, the verse melodies ascend, and the open-throated singing transforms the chorus into a kind of earnest incantation that the songwriter probably wouldn’t attempt himself. Cohen may sing about transcendence, but he seems never to fully endorse it.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/19/09
transcendence, but I don’t endorse it.
Inhibited by devastating doubt,
which is the skeptic scholar's corset,
I soar towards the sun and the supernal,
but tend to be too temperamental
to focus on what’s labeled as eternal,
and temporize, untranscendental.
Unlike Leonard’s gift my own, though golden,
was not a singer’s velvet voice.
To unsung words I’ve always been beholden,
and neither Carnegie nor Royce
have halls where verses unaccompanied
by instruments like a guitar
or piano draw the audiences I need
to validate my verse, as noir
as Leonard’s, and emerging from the same
Judaic sources we endorse.
Not wild—in fact I’d say extremely tame—
about the transcendental force,
I try to make the point that life must be
experienced without expectation
that we should wait for what we cannot see,
transcendent causes for elation.
Inspired by an article on Leonard Cohen in the New Yorker by Sasha Frere-Jones (“State of Grace: Leonard Cohen’s Return,” August 24, 2009):
Over the past forty years, Cohen’s songs have been covered so often they’ve become their own cottage industry. Aretha Franklin, Jarvis Cocker, Philip Glass, Will Oldham, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nina Simone, Willie Nelson, Françoise Hardy, Anthony Michael Hall, Bob Dylan, Rufus Wainwright, and the Whiffenpoofs have all recorded Cohen songs. During the fourth week of December of last year, two versions of Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—one by Jeff Buckley and one by Alexandra Burke, a winning contestant on the British talent show “X Factor”—occupied the No. 1 and No. 2 slots on the U.K. charts. Cohen’s lyrics stand up in a variety of settings, and his limited vocal range tends to leave his melodies unfinished, allowing room for experimentation. On Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” for instance, the verse melodies ascend, and the open-throated singing transforms the chorus into a kind of earnest incantation that the songwriter probably wouldn’t attempt himself. Cohen may sing about transcendence, but he seems never to fully endorse it.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/19/09
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
wrong notes
It’s not wrong notes that matter when
the piece of music is performed;
wrong feelings are what tell us when
the composition’s so deformed
that we no longer can get pleasure
from notes which, though they may be played
without mistakes, cause ever measure
to clash, and make us feel dismayed.
Dennis Bartel’s “great composer” this morning was Beethoven, who apparently did not mind his piano students playing wrong notes, declaring that what counted was the feeling with which the music was played. If that is wrong, he said, it invalidates everything that is being played.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/18/09
the piece of music is performed;
wrong feelings are what tell us when
the composition’s so deformed
that we no longer can get pleasure
from notes which, though they may be played
without mistakes, cause ever measure
to clash, and make us feel dismayed.
Dennis Bartel’s “great composer” this morning was Beethoven, who apparently did not mind his piano students playing wrong notes, declaring that what counted was the feeling with which the music was played. If that is wrong, he said, it invalidates everything that is being played.
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/18/09
Monday, August 17, 2009
freewheelin'
FREEWHEELIN’
Freewheelin, and unrecognizable
to those who think they know just how I look,
disrespected, and derisible,
I put some of my thoughts into a book,
but more are in my poems, which I’m willin’
to have interpreted as songs like those
that have the imprimatur of Bob Dylan,
celebrity who, like me, no one knows.
Unlike Felix in the Hebrides––
not the black cat somewhat like Obama,
but Felix Mendlessohn––celebrity’s
a fate for which I am a poor programmer,
without the skill Bob Dylan demonstrates
for decades without interruption, since
my own freewheelin’ discombobulates
my meanings making all my readers wince
Unlike Bob, I carry an ID
wherever I may be, but men are still
suspicious, since they think that I may be
delusional, distracted by molehill
when I should really focus on a mountain;
a wife, some family and friends will vouch
for me, but while on all of them I’m countin’,
I cause them pain, though they don’t cry out “Ouch!”
Unrecognizable, freewheelin’, like
Bob Dylan, I press on regardless, writin’
the sorts of poems that sometimes outpsych
my readers, though I think they rock like Brighton.
Without the sort of music Bob composes
they may not hit you in the gut until
you more influence of Prophet Moses,
than Moses Mendlessohn’s ascetic skill.
Inspired by a news item in the NYT, August 17, 2009, complied by Rachel Lee Harris “The Freewheelin’, Unrecognizable Bob Dylan”:
“How does it feel?” Bob Dylan wondered back in 1965, to be on your own, “like a complete unknown.” Now he knows. Two police officers in their 20s asked Mr. Dylan, 68, to provide identification as he took a stroll through Long Branch, N.J., last month, The Associated Press reported. The officers were responding to a report from residents that an “eccentric-looking old man” had wandered into their yard, according to ABC News. Mr. Dylan, right, who said he was looking at houses to pass some time before that night’s show with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, was not carrying identification, so the officers accompanied him back to his hotel, where concert workers vouched for him. “I’ve seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago, and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all,” Officer Kristie Buble told ABC News. “We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something. He was acting very suspicious. Not delusional, just suspicious.”
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/17/09
Freewheelin, and unrecognizable
to those who think they know just how I look,
disrespected, and derisible,
I put some of my thoughts into a book,
but more are in my poems, which I’m willin’
to have interpreted as songs like those
that have the imprimatur of Bob Dylan,
celebrity who, like me, no one knows.
Unlike Felix in the Hebrides––
not the black cat somewhat like Obama,
but Felix Mendlessohn––celebrity’s
a fate for which I am a poor programmer,
without the skill Bob Dylan demonstrates
for decades without interruption, since
my own freewheelin’ discombobulates
my meanings making all my readers wince
Unlike Bob, I carry an ID
wherever I may be, but men are still
suspicious, since they think that I may be
delusional, distracted by molehill
when I should really focus on a mountain;
a wife, some family and friends will vouch
for me, but while on all of them I’m countin’,
I cause them pain, though they don’t cry out “Ouch!”
Unrecognizable, freewheelin’, like
Bob Dylan, I press on regardless, writin’
the sorts of poems that sometimes outpsych
my readers, though I think they rock like Brighton.
Without the sort of music Bob composes
they may not hit you in the gut until
you more influence of Prophet Moses,
than Moses Mendlessohn’s ascetic skill.
Inspired by a news item in the NYT, August 17, 2009, complied by Rachel Lee Harris “The Freewheelin’, Unrecognizable Bob Dylan”:
“How does it feel?” Bob Dylan wondered back in 1965, to be on your own, “like a complete unknown.” Now he knows. Two police officers in their 20s asked Mr. Dylan, 68, to provide identification as he took a stroll through Long Branch, N.J., last month, The Associated Press reported. The officers were responding to a report from residents that an “eccentric-looking old man” had wandered into their yard, according to ABC News. Mr. Dylan, right, who said he was looking at houses to pass some time before that night’s show with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, was not carrying identification, so the officers accompanied him back to his hotel, where concert workers vouched for him. “I’ve seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago, and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all,” Officer Kristie Buble told ABC News. “We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something. He was acting very suspicious. Not delusional, just suspicious.”
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/17/09
Sunday, August 16, 2009
feeder funds
FEEDER FUNDS
When a fund that is a feeder
turns into a money bleeder
investors who’ve been badly scammed,
if not yet flat-line cardiogrammed,
call in for help the FBI,
and have to wave their wealth bye-bye.
There’s no point asking for refunds
from managers of feeder funds,
who generally are quite immune
to prosecution, though the tune
the piper played was paid by them.
The FBI cannot condemn
these rascals, or the bankers who
loaned money for this succès fou,
and still deny of guilt the onus,
awarding a humungous bonus
to all who got us in this mess,
themselves, by turning more to less.
The co-conspirators who’ve pissed
vast sums away will not be missed,
because the ones who do not keep
their jobs—and many will—still sleep
quite soundly, supervised by Feds
who’re also sleeping in their beds
when they’re not borrowing more cash
from China, and refuse to smash
root causes of the problem that
may force us soon to pass the hat
around, since we now all are bleeders.
Play close attention, please, dear readers.
The deficit’s the problem, stupid,
and while Rome burns no one can dupe it.
Our problems, worse than Madoff’s fraud,
loom did Damocles’ sword;
in wait for us they lie, while lurkin’
as once with feeder funds E. Merkin,
and Gabriel and Fairfield Greenwich,
famed predatory feeder ménage,
while everyone’s still in denial
until their case comes up for trial,
including Treasury that borrows
and puts off until sad tomorrows
the day of reckoning, a banker
that’s slower than an Exxon tanker,
which spills the wealth it bleeds like oil,
to Wall Street losers ever loyal.
Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Erin Arvedlund’s book “Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff” and “Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff,” by Andrew Kirtman (“A Scoundrel in the Land of the Lax,” NYT, August 14, 2009):
Bernard L. Madoff was not just the world’s biggest thief, who decimated the savings of thousands and wrecked countless lives, but he also became the hated embodiment of a gilded era that crashed and burned in 2008. He was a liar and a cheat who flourished in a bubble economy where people got used to living beyond their means; where cheap credit fueled pie-in-the-sky, get-rich-quick dreams; and where both the wealthy and not-so-wealthy bought into schemes that defied gravity and logic. As the investigative reporter Erin Arvedlund observes in her new book, “Too Good to Be True,” Mr. Madoff “personified all that was false, all that appeared to be upside down in the world” at a time when it was suddenly revealed that “homes weren’t worth what was once thought, stock prices stopped going up, all assets seemed to collapse in value at the same time.” Or, as the journalist Andrew Kirtzman observes in his new book, “Betrayal”: Mr. Madoff was both “a proxy” for the sins of “financial institutions whose irresponsibility almost brought down the economy,” and a “frightening example of nobody asking questions when the going was good,” of a society in which few “questioned the sanity of subprime mortgage derivatives” or the odds of endlessly rising house prices, and in which government regulators were too hapless or lax to put the brakes on abuses and outright deceit….
Of course, as the long-ignored Mr. Markopolos well knew, clues to Mr. Madoff’s scam were also available to his more financially savvy investors, particularly the heads of funds like those run by the Fairfield Greenwich Group and the Gabriel Capital Group. But denial seems to have been the order of the day on the part of feeder-fund brass who were getting rich collecting management fees for the money they were handing over to Mr. Madoff. Some simply failed to do due diligence. Some assured themselves that a successful broker like Mr. Madoff, in Ms. Arvedlund’s words, “didn’t need to be a crook.” And some suspected that he might be up to something illegal, but assumed he was doing it on their behalf. In the end, there was a broad spectrum of Madoff victims, who spanned many classes and communities and much of the world: friends and their friends and relatives who trusted “Uncle Bernie” to keep their money safe; ordinary people who had no idea that the feeder funds they’d invested in were actually funneling the money to Mr. Madoff; retail investors who thought they were being prudent in choosing funds that promised such consistent returns; wealthy clients who thought they were joining an exclusive club by handing their cash over to Mr. Madoff; and some clients who thought, as one banker put it, that “they were getting a real Rolex for 20 bucks.”
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/14/09
When a fund that is a feeder
turns into a money bleeder
investors who’ve been badly scammed,
if not yet flat-line cardiogrammed,
call in for help the FBI,
and have to wave their wealth bye-bye.
There’s no point asking for refunds
from managers of feeder funds,
who generally are quite immune
to prosecution, though the tune
the piper played was paid by them.
The FBI cannot condemn
these rascals, or the bankers who
loaned money for this succès fou,
and still deny of guilt the onus,
awarding a humungous bonus
to all who got us in this mess,
themselves, by turning more to less.
The co-conspirators who’ve pissed
vast sums away will not be missed,
because the ones who do not keep
their jobs—and many will—still sleep
quite soundly, supervised by Feds
who’re also sleeping in their beds
when they’re not borrowing more cash
from China, and refuse to smash
root causes of the problem that
may force us soon to pass the hat
around, since we now all are bleeders.
Play close attention, please, dear readers.
The deficit’s the problem, stupid,
and while Rome burns no one can dupe it.
Our problems, worse than Madoff’s fraud,
loom did Damocles’ sword;
in wait for us they lie, while lurkin’
as once with feeder funds E. Merkin,
and Gabriel and Fairfield Greenwich,
famed predatory feeder ménage,
while everyone’s still in denial
until their case comes up for trial,
including Treasury that borrows
and puts off until sad tomorrows
the day of reckoning, a banker
that’s slower than an Exxon tanker,
which spills the wealth it bleeds like oil,
to Wall Street losers ever loyal.
Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Erin Arvedlund’s book “Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff” and “Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff,” by Andrew Kirtman (“A Scoundrel in the Land of the Lax,” NYT, August 14, 2009):
Bernard L. Madoff was not just the world’s biggest thief, who decimated the savings of thousands and wrecked countless lives, but he also became the hated embodiment of a gilded era that crashed and burned in 2008. He was a liar and a cheat who flourished in a bubble economy where people got used to living beyond their means; where cheap credit fueled pie-in-the-sky, get-rich-quick dreams; and where both the wealthy and not-so-wealthy bought into schemes that defied gravity and logic. As the investigative reporter Erin Arvedlund observes in her new book, “Too Good to Be True,” Mr. Madoff “personified all that was false, all that appeared to be upside down in the world” at a time when it was suddenly revealed that “homes weren’t worth what was once thought, stock prices stopped going up, all assets seemed to collapse in value at the same time.” Or, as the journalist Andrew Kirtzman observes in his new book, “Betrayal”: Mr. Madoff was both “a proxy” for the sins of “financial institutions whose irresponsibility almost brought down the economy,” and a “frightening example of nobody asking questions when the going was good,” of a society in which few “questioned the sanity of subprime mortgage derivatives” or the odds of endlessly rising house prices, and in which government regulators were too hapless or lax to put the brakes on abuses and outright deceit….
Of course, as the long-ignored Mr. Markopolos well knew, clues to Mr. Madoff’s scam were also available to his more financially savvy investors, particularly the heads of funds like those run by the Fairfield Greenwich Group and the Gabriel Capital Group. But denial seems to have been the order of the day on the part of feeder-fund brass who were getting rich collecting management fees for the money they were handing over to Mr. Madoff. Some simply failed to do due diligence. Some assured themselves that a successful broker like Mr. Madoff, in Ms. Arvedlund’s words, “didn’t need to be a crook.” And some suspected that he might be up to something illegal, but assumed he was doing it on their behalf. In the end, there was a broad spectrum of Madoff victims, who spanned many classes and communities and much of the world: friends and their friends and relatives who trusted “Uncle Bernie” to keep their money safe; ordinary people who had no idea that the feeder funds they’d invested in were actually funneling the money to Mr. Madoff; retail investors who thought they were being prudent in choosing funds that promised such consistent returns; wealthy clients who thought they were joining an exclusive club by handing their cash over to Mr. Madoff; and some clients who thought, as one banker put it, that “they were getting a real Rolex for 20 bucks.”
© 2009 Gershon Hepner 8/14/09
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