More Fixed Games

Some years back, my family was close to a builder named A.J. He was educated to an extent, but had been a jock, a college baseball player to be precise. He was also a coach, umpire, and referee. We would talk economy with A.J. and he would declare, "the game is rigged." Of course, at the time under the end of Carter's mismanagement and the start of Reagan's resurgence, we dismissed his sport's analogy as we knew so much more and explained the complex degree of regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal rules, and even IRS intrusiveness that would naturally preclude market-manipulation and keep stock-trades and other investments fair, indeed beyond reproach. After Madoff and now with Stanford and his alleged eight(8) billion dollar manipulation, my hat is off to A.J., Mr. Johnson, you are correct, time has acquitted your suspicions, the dealers dealt from the bottom of the deck and unwary buy-and-hold investors were victims of one of the most corrupt casinos in the world. Stanford was evidently a cricket enthusiast, not a crime by any means but unusual for someone from Texas, the heart of the land for baseball, apple pie, and as the old commercial says, Chevrolet. What kind of confidence can anyone have in anything when it seems that the aforementioned national past time has become nothing but a rogues' gallery of steroid-enhanced record breakers? Even arguably the game's best, Alex Rodriguez is tainted. You used to hear "Go to school, listen to your parents, take your vitamins, and play by the rules and you will be a major-leaguer." Now, you might hear "skip school, shoot 'roids, and make forty mil", but that figure seems like chump change when contrasted with what honest, play by the book investors have recently had stolen. Wall Street seems to have been awash with sharks, and we were the guppies they devoured by the thousands as they had their blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy.

Sweet Cesspool Chicago

Yet another politician has been implicated in the endemic corruption of Illinois politics. With today's charges against Governor Blagojevich, another Presidential pardon will soon be forthcoming. Rats of all stripes, Republican and Democrat alike, have emerged from Chicago sewers. I fear that the largest rodent of all may have crawled out and is about to raid the White House cupboard. But today some good news appeared at a Cracker Barrel in Tennessee where a woman found $97,000 and actually returned the cheese to its rightful owner. Diogenes would have been proud and that cash would never make it into the Cayman account of an Illinois politician-would it?