Skip to content

Grifter Nation, local edition

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Samuel Johnson said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, but surely he was wrong. It may be next but one, but surely, as Chuck Colson, John Rowland, and many others have proven, the very last refuge is religion. I submit that skipping patriotism, or at least skipping the money making side of it-politics, and going straight to religion, is a wise career move. Generally speaking, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Christine O’Donnell and Sarah Palin being glaring exceptions, you can’t make patriotism pay unless you are able to fool most of the people most of the time, while religion pays if you merely fool some of the people all of the time. Moreover, while there’s only room for a few scammers of the Beck variety, there’s room for millions of low level religious con men, and, unless you get too blatant about it, everything you do is constitutionally protected.

Consider the case of Michael Calo. The Day has documented Mr. Calo’s checkered career as a relatively small time scam artist (only the small timers get arrested, remember. The truly great scam artists get bailouts) fleecing people during the dot.com era and thereafter. Calo has now found religion and the Shoreline Church, Inc., where he has put his talents to work serving God and man:

[George] Hamberg and a couple who also complained to police about Calo dispute the notion that he found redemption when he formed Shoreline Church.

“To me, it’s like it’s a money-making thing,” said Hamberg, who filed a complaint with the Old Saybrook Police Department in 2008, concerned that his then-wife, Della, was donating money she couldn’t afford to the church.
The Hambergs were going through a divorce that involved the imminent loss of their home and business in Old Saybrook, Hamberg said, when he learned Della had donated more than $8,000 to the church. Hamberg said he was able to trace $8,000 in donations through checks but said Della gave more in cash.

“George said that Della has told family members she will no longer listen to their legal or financial advice but will only listen to Pastors Mike and Meredith Calo of the Shoreline Church,” according to a Jan. 9, 2008, police report obtained through a Connecticut Freedom of Information Act request.
Another couple told police their daughter gave nearly half of her family’s $30,000 annual income to the church.

Barry and Natalie Rand of Old Lyme said during an interview at their home last month that the more their daughter, Kelly Mastello, became involved with the church, the more she changed and the more her finances deteriorated.

The married mother of three lost her car, sold her house after pre-foreclosure proceedings had begun and moved into an apartment owned by the pastor’s in-laws, paying $1,000 in monthly rent, according to Rand’s statement in a police report and records at East Haddam Town Hall.

By all means read the full article. It’s chock-a-block with details of this guy’s colorful career. The guy is a prize, and his little wife too. I’d say he gives religion a bad name, but in this day and age, that’s pretty hard to do.

By the way, kudos to The Day for committing real journalism in this piece.

Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

O’Reilly’s proof of god

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Here’s a good take down of Bill O’Reilly’s “tide goes in, tide goes out” proof of the deity’s existence. According to Bill, the fact that the tides never miss a beat is proof that there must be a God, for after all, who can explain such wonderful regularity. As it turns out, lots of people.

But I can’t resist piling on, and I think my observation is at least somewhat different than all the telling points made by others.

Isn’t O’Reilly attempting to use the basic argument for science against it? It is the very fact of nature’s regularity -it’s obedience to laws- that makes science possible. If the tides came in and out at unpredictable or random intervals, that would make it well nigh impossible to come up with a scientific explanation for the phenomenom. That type of irregularity, like a “miracle” would argue for the existence of some capricious “intelligence” controlling nature. Regularity in nature doesn’t prove the existence of God, even if we can’t understand the reason for the regularity. It argues for a natural cause. Indeed, I’d venture to say that throughout history it was the perceived irregularities-thunder, lightening, eclipses, comets-which, because they could not be understood, drove people to posit the existence of fickle gods and goddesses. Predictable things-sun goes up, sun goes down-because they were reliable were far less likely to inspire the fear that created the gods.

I must now apologize for the above post. I am deeply troubled by the fact that the casual reader might think I take O’Reilly seriously. What I’ve said so far could certainly leave that impression, and for that I apologize.


Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

Apple: rotten to the core?

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

My RSS feeds come in two basic flavors: politics and computers. The computer feeds are heavily concentrated on things Apple. I bought a Mac about seven years ago and have never looked back. Back then, Apple was still a relatively bit player in the computer world, and besides getting better technology and software, you could also delude yourself into thinking you were supporting the little guy against big, bad Microsoft.

Alas, even that delusion can no longer be indulged. Today, my computer feeds are all abuzz about the joint announcement by Apple and the News Corporation (i.e., Rupert Mudoch, i.e., Fox) of the release of a (for now) IPad only daily newspaper. Murdoch has the ability to sell his Ipad publication by subscription, something no other publisher can do. So, the former foe of the Microsoft evil empire has joined up with the far more evil Rupert Murdoch. Of course the tech savvy but ideologically blind tech writers don’t even discuss the ideological slant of this new publication, but can there be any doubt?

Meanwhile Bill Gates is curing polio. Are there no eternal verities in this modern world?

Filed in Computer Stuff, Corporate Crime, Media | | Comments (1)

America is a great country: Corporate Edition

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

One of Mel Brooks’ characters observed that “It’s good to be the King”. Well, in America, being the land of opportunity, you don’t need to be a king. Being a corporation will do.

Besides being entitled to all the perks of personhood, courtesy of the Supreme Court, you get to get to game the system in so many wonderful ways. Case in point in this morning’s Times. David Leonhardt calls it the Paradox of Corporate Taxes. What’s the paradox. Well, it lies in the fact that the United States has the highest nominal corporate tax rate in the world, and one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates, given the number of loopholes granted to the corporations by a compliant U.S. government.

This results in a best of both worlds situation for the corporations. They, along with their lobbyists and their (mostly) Republican Congressional supporters get to complain ceaselessly about high U.S. tax rates, using that complaint as a device to extract ever more loopholes, while enjoying the benefit of an actually very low tax rate (getting lower all the time as those loopholes accrue), which costs no more to get than the salaries of a few tax lawyers, a few lobbyists, and the occasional bribe to a Congressman, the latter of which comes incredibly cheap. Meanwhile we the real taxpayers, and the U.S. economy as a whole, gets the shaft.

It’s good to be a corporation.


Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Paul Ryan

Monday, January 31, 2011

This is rather personal for me. From Crooks and Liars:

In Paul Ryan’s response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last week, he fretted over our social safety nets becoming hammocks.

Ryan is the guy, as you probably know, who is hell bent on destroying Social Security and Medicare. But in turns out, as Crooks and Liars (quoting these folks) points out, that someone should ask him whether he spent his time after 10th grade in a hammock:

One day as a 16 year old, Ryan came upon the lifeless body of his father. Paul Ryan, Sr. had died of a heart attack at age 55, leaving the Janesville Craig High School 10th grader, his three older brothers and sisters and his mother alone. It was Paul who told the family of his father’s death.

With his father’s passing, young Paul collected Social Security benefits until age 18, which he put away for college. To make ends meet, Paul’s mother returned to school to study interior design. His siblings were off at college. Ryan remembers this difficult time bringing him and his mother closer.

That was me, only I was younger (9) when my father died of a heart attack, leaving 6 kids behind, all of whom, plus his wife, received social security benefits. Who knows what would have happened to us without them. Along with that we received other benefits, such as VA benefits. I know I was getting a check every month while I was in college, so the benefits continued at least until I graduated. My mother is still collecting, more than 50 years on, so I’m fairly sure that we have collected far more in total than my father ever paid in.

Apparently, either Ryan believes he didn’t deserve that money, or has made himself believe that somehow it doesn’t count in his case. I suspect the latter, as I have a right wing brother who rejects the very notion that he has a big time debt to the “welfare state”. He simply can’t accept that he was getting government benefits; somehow it was different when he got it. I’ve always felt a tremendous debt to the Social Security program. I remember in college, speaking up when some affluent radicals in a history class I was taking insisted that the New Deal, not being socialistic enough, had made no real difference in the country. I said I wouldn’t have been there, at a top flight liberal arts college, if it weren’t for social security, so it had made a hell of a difference to me. Those kids didn’t know better, since it was all theory at that point in their lives. What’s Ryan’s excuse?

Right now I don’t need social security, and it’s entirely possible, thanks to the boost I got when I did need it, that I will never really need it again, though I’ll certainly take it when my time comes. But I’m acutely aware that I owe a debt to the sons and daughters of all those folks who paid into the system so that Paul Ryan and I could get a decent start in life.

Ryan has presumably convinced himself that he made it on his own. No one does. We’re all in this together.


Filed in Republicans | Tagged | Comments (3)

Book review with comment

Sunday, January 30, 2011

I just finished Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, and I highly recommend it. It is an excellent account of the scam artistry that destroyed the economy, and is, like the vampire squid to which he compares Goldman Sachs, (the arch, but not only villain of the book) sucking the life blood out of the country. It’s a more readable and less circumspect version of the recently released Financial Commission report, leavened with humor, most of it dark.

A short synopsis: This country is controlled by Wall Street traders, who have no allegiance to anything other than their own personal gain. They are systematically siphoning money from the American economy into their own non-productive pockets, with the help of politicians who are more than satisfied with crumbs off the table, aided by a corporate media that diverts the attention of the mass of easily deluded Americans away from the oligarchy that is controlling the country and toward socially divisive trivialities, all while they are hollowing out the country by selling off its assets to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Even shorter synopsis: this country is toast, burnt to a crisp by Wall Street.

Well, you probably knew all that, but the book is still worth reading, since he sets it all out in a highly readable fashion.

Speaking of the financial crisis, it at least appears as if it will be harder to make the “no one could have seen this coming” defense the inevitable next time it happens. As the Times’ Gretchen Morgenstern observed this morning, in discussing the Commission’s report:

Yet the report still makes for compelling reading because so little has changed as a result of the debacle, in both banking and in its regulation. Providing chapter and verse, for example, on the bumbling and siloed management at the nation’s largest banks is enlightening, in that many of these institutions are even bigger than they were before. With too-big-to-fail institutions now larger than ever, we are almost certain to go through another episode like 2008 in the not-too-distant future.

This has become almost conventional wisdom, though amnesia may set in soon. Still, even while the memory and the realization are fresh, we do nothing, which proves yet again who is really pulling the strings.


Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, January 28, 2011

To the people of Egypt. Here’s hoping that they come out of this with something better than they’ve got now.

I realize, by the way, that the word “crusade” is problematic, but you can’t have everything. It’s a wonderful song.


Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, January 28, 2011

Back in the early 80s, my wife and I went through a period when we watched a lot of MTV. Those were the days when they actually played music videos, with VeeJays and everything. One performer we saw a lot of was Cindi Lauper. I’ve often wondered what happened to her. It seems she’s still around, as a matter of fact. Here she is singing her first, and probably biggest, hit, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Now, here she is singing an acoustic version of She-Bop on a Queens subway stop somewhere. Ignore the annoying Ellen Degeneres. In fact, start at about 2:00 and you can avoid most of Ellen.


Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Democrats preserve the filibuster

Friday, January 28, 2011

If you were interested in knowing how interested Senate Democrats are in actually governing, you now have your answer: not very.

I’ve said before (too lazy to find a link) that we would know whether the Democrats had any serious intentions to accomplish anything by whether or not they did anything substantive about the filibuster.

Well, they didn’t. Apart from one or two welcome but relatively trivial reforms, nothing has changed.

The Democrats declined to play hardball, and in fact adopted a procedure that required 67 votes to do anything, which guaranteed they would fail. The Republicans, in turn, promised not to play hardball and deprive the Democrats of the filibuster in 2012, should the Republicans take over. The Democrats apparently believe, or pretend to believe, that they can trust the Republicans. And maybe they can, on that issue, because the Republicans can easily cow enough Democrats to overcome just about any filibuster. Anyway, the Republicans, from a strategic point of view, know they won’t care about getting rid of filibusters in 2012. They all know they aren’t likely to take the White House, so they won’t be passing legislation. All they are going to want to do is prevent legislation from passing, which they can do whether they are in the majority or the minority.


Filed in Democrats | | Comments (0)

The Definition of Chutzpah

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

This is rich:

Robert G. Burton wants UConn to give him his $3 million back.

Burton gave the money to the University of Connecticut to build the Burton Family Football Complex in Storrs. Now, citing disagreements with the school’s athletic director and a desire to be consulted about the new football coach, he wants that donation returned and his family’s name taken off the facility altogether.

We live in an age completely lacking in honor, in which our rich feel they have a right not only to unspeakable riches, but constant massaging. Maybe I’m naive, but I always thought that a gift was something that one gave without strings, and it is rather tacky to demand it back, no matter what the circumstances. Mr. Burton appears to think that gifts are made with unspoken but implicit conditions, one of them apparently being that the giver has the right to have his ass kissed, the number of times and the length of the kisses being directly proportional to the amount of the gift. I feel his pain. I give regularly to my alma mater, and not once have I been consulted about hiring decisions. But, if truth be told, if my ass kissing theory is correct, my kisses would be so few and brief it would not be worth pulling down my pants.

Now, in a rational world, the folks at UConn would conclude that Mr Burton has destroyed any bargaining power he has. A gift is a gift, and they are under no legal obligation to return it. Since he has announced that UConn is dead to him, UConn has nothing to gain by giving him a dime. They should, therefore, tell him to stick it. But this world has gone mad in many ways, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave him his money.


Filed in Local issues | | Comments (3)