FinermanWorks

SCANDALOUS $10 MILLION BAT MITZVAH

ABC NEWS
The headliners read like a who’s who of music: Aerosmith, 50 Cent and Don Henley of the Eagles. No, it wasn’t the Grammys, it was 13-year-old Elizabeth Brooks’ birthday party — a $10 million mega bat mitzvah. Aerosmith alone was paid a $1 million to perform — flown in on her father’s company jet.

Her father is David Brooks, who was then the CEO of DHB Industries, the leading body armor provider to U.S. soliders in Iraq. And he had his company pick up the tab for the party two years ago, according to investigators.

Most of us will never earn ten million dollars in a lifetime. Evidently, neither did David Brooks. He was just indicted for fraud, tax evasion and insider trading. Perhaps billing the company for his wife’s facelift was not really a legitimate business expense. And would you be surprised to learn that his company’s products are defective? The body armor that isn’t. When tested, DHB’s Swiss Cheesecloth was found to have “critical life-threatening flaws.” Policemen in New York and U.S marines in Iraq have discovered that their bullet-proof vests couldn’t stop a dust bunny. So David Brooks might be an accessory to murder. He may have killed so many Americans that he qualifies as an Al Quada All-Star.

Of course, a man who’d squander ten million dollars on a Bat Mitzvah is capable of any crime. The very idea seems so Anti-Semitic that Mel Gibson must be jealous. That ten million dollar orgy of excess is blasphemy, an affront to God and his first two commandments: “Thou Shall Have No Other God Before Me” and “Thou Shall Not Worship Idols”. Brooks was worshipping himself–a self-made Golden Calf–rather than the tenets and values of Judaism.

If you believe in Judaism, you believe in justice. Unlike those gorgeous, sexually omnivorous idols of Olympus and Asgard, our staid, stiff God pioneered morality along with a constricting dietary code. Thou shall not steal, and certainly not to subsidize a teenage bacchanalia. A poor bedouin people, then a scattered and persecuted tribe, through the ages all we Jews truly possessed were our faith and values. At the whim of Crusader or Cossack our material acquisitions were gone, but our teachings endured. They defined us and gave us a strength that has defied history.

Now, we find ourselves in a land of tolerance and opportunity; the ghetto has given way to the suburb. We no longer are restricted by the majority’s Church or prey to the bigotry of a Tsar. In fact, we are free to make asses of ourselves. Philip Roth was never at a loss for satire. The bar mitzvah has long since become a parody of its original purpose: a genuine rite of passage. Today, the ceremony is just an excuse for extravagance. Modern American Judaism seems largely defined by its sense of humor and a high cholesterol diet. But our heritage still imbues us with an empathy to the oppressed and an indignation with injustice. Although we did not copyright the Golden Rule, we apply it when we vote.

But those values mean nothing to David Brooks. Nature should not merely abhor a vacuum; it should despise him.

Tomorrow I may come up with satirical ways to spend ten million dollars on a bar mitzvah. But today I am just too angry.

Communication Consul
Company: Allstate

That is what the ad said, and it certainly is an interesting job offer. Of course, Communication Imperator would have been better, but I still am tempted by the prospect of six months of supreme power in communications, Imagine enforcing grammar and clarity on a major corporation.

As Consul, I would start by executing the Human Resources Department. Feeding them to the lions, although traditional, would be cruel to the animals. The appropriate demise would be to bury the HR jargoons alive under their own opaque paperwork.

Next, I would outlaw Powerpoint presentations. There was an appropriate time and place for pictures with a grunting narrative: cave drawings. I intend to advance corporate communications to at least 100 B.C.

On pain of death, no one will be allowed to say “pro-active.” There will be a strict quota on the following words: metrics, stakeholder, function, process, strategic. None of these words may be used more than three times a week, and they may never appear in the same paragraph.

Yes, I would make a very enthusiastic Consul. I am even starting to think with a British accent.

Fortunately, reading the ad for further details, I learn the bitter truth. In the jargon of Allstate, “consul” is short for consultant. That is quite a demotion: from Caesar to kibitzer. However, that only proves my point. Any company that thinks consul is the abbreviation of consultant deserves a Communication Caligula.

ACTRESS GRETCHEN MOL WELCOMES A SON

Actress Gretchen Mol and her husband, director Tod Williams, are parents of a baby boy. Ptolemy John Williams was born on September 10, according to the actress’ spokesperson.

Mol, 34, who starred in 2005’s ‘The Notorious Betty Page,’ has recently moved back to New York from Los Angeles. She said back in July (07), “I wanted to have a New York baby.”

Of course, everyone in New York wanted to know, “Is the kid named for Ptolemy the General or Ptolemy the Astronomer?” Sam Feinblatt of Brooklyn agreed with Ms. Mol’s presumed preference for Macedonian commanders. “Ptolemy–good choice. Perdiccas and Antigonus were just hollow breastplates. Seleucus was all right, but these days you don’t say anything good about a ruler of Syria.”

But Tony Gustacelli of Queens hoped that Ms. Mol was an astronomy groupie. “Hey, Ptolemy may have wrong about his geocentric calculations, but his theory had style. It made an impression. Eratosthenes correctly calculated the earth’s circumference but who wants to name a kid for him?”

Fairfax Whitsheath (Exeter, Dartmouth, Harvard Business School, Manhattan, Hamptons) questioned the wisdom of Ptolemy in either case. “It’s a little too ethnic for good taste. If you must name a child for a military megalomaniac, MacArthur won’t keep you off any A-list. As for geocentric astronomers, at least Tycho Brahe was our type.”

Teenager Jamal Jones of Harlem expressed a general sentiment of his generation, “Hipparchus was a better astronomer and is a much cooler name.”

WHITE HOUSE EDITED CDC CLIMATE TESTIMONY

Associated Press

Oct 24th, 2007 | WASHINGTON — The White House significantly edited testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on health, deleting key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate, documents obtained by The Associated Press showed Wednesday.

The White House on Wednesday denied that it had “watered down” the congressional testimony that Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had given the day before to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But a draft of the testimony submitted for White House review shows that six pages of details about specific disease and other health problems that might flourish if the Earth warms were not delivered at the hearing.

When asked about the bruises on her face, Dr. Gerberding explained that she repeatedly ran into doors.

Addressing another scientific question President Bush today denounced the Heliocentric Theory. “The earth does not evolve around Hell.” When a reporter suggested that Helios was a Greek allusion to the Sun, the President replied, “I don’t approve of Greek lewdness. I just know what Hell means in English.”

The State Department then urged “necessary restraint” on the use of Greek words. “We wouldn’t want to offend our Turkish friends.” In the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell proposed a motion to condemn Hell. “Let the American people and God know if you are for or against Evil.” The cowed Democrats agreed to the bill as well as the amendment to remove Helium from the Periodic Table.

Some scientists and journalists did attempt to explain that the Heliocentric Theory referred to the Earth’s revolving around the Sun. Unfortunately, these self-confessed Heliocentrists made matters worse by admitting that Copernicus and Galileo were not Americans. As Sean Hannity demanded, “If Galileo is not a Satanist, why does he look like Osama Bin Ladin!”

I must have missed the obituary but the English language is definitely dead. Yesterday I received this notification of an opening for a free-lance writer.

The project: The client is looking for a communications expert to help develop a change management program to affect change from the senior management team down throughout a large department and streamline their communication processes. This role also will be responsible for executing the communications program they develop.

My first assignment would be to translate that job description into English. I have no idea what it means, although it does seem sinister. A change management program sounds like a euphemism for “downsizing” which in itself is a euphemism for massacre. If so, why would you hire a writer to organize a purge? (Actually, Stalin worked as a journalist and an editor, so there is a precedent.) I don’t know if the employer would want a resume or a rap sheet, but I won’t submit either. Whatever the job actually is, the description appalls me.

MBAs and bureaucrats are waging a Jihad against intelligible English. These Jargoons would impose on us a nerd-minimalist gibberish, or as “they” would say: wordize wordizations. Do you think that I am joking? It may be a satire, but we are living it.

I once was assigned to write a booklet explaining an employee pension plan. If accountants determined the Nobel Prize in Literature, I would have been in the running. My work was praised for its clarity. An employee focus group said “this is the first time that I understood our pension plan.” That is why the corporation’s Human Resource department vetoed the booklet’s publication. The writing was too lucid. I was summoned to the office of a HR vice president. Her demeanor had no semblance of emotion; on her office wall was a Masters’ Degree from the University of Chicago, confirming that she had been completely drained of humanity. Although she was not the one hired me or was paying me, she usurped the right to fire me. My writing apparently was subversive. She complained that if the employees understood what they read about the pension plan, they would have specific expectations and the company might feel trapped into honoring its commitments.

At least I was paid for my work. I don’t know if a pension booklet was ever written for this major corporation. You could be certain, however, that any such booklet would be a proactive teamization.

I read the Chicago Tribune for the funnies. (No, I am not referring to the Op-Ed page, where the unintentional jokes always have same punchline: it is all Franklin Roosevelt’s fault.) I might even admit to being addicted. When I was a Eurrail pass vagabond in Europe, way back in ‘75, I had my mother save me each day’s comic days. That was an 11 month accumulation.

In fact, comic strips are almost my vicarious family. Dilbert is practically my twin, Cathy is my sister, and Brenda Starr is my transsexual brother. So I was distressed to learn of a crisis in the family: in “For Better or Worse” mom and dad may be getting a divorce. The strip’s creator Lynn Johnston is said to use her three-dimensional existence as the basis of her storylines. She is married to a Canadian dentist; so is the strip’s main character Elly Patterson. Mrs. Patterson is undergoing menopause; I can take a wild guess about Ms. Johnston’s hormone balance. Unfortunately, in Ms. Johnston’s real life, her husband is leaving her for another woman; in yesterday’s strip, our heroine dreams exactly that.

While Ms. Johnston can certainly afford a ruthless divorce attorney, Mrs. Patterson probably cannot. However, she is entitled to help from her fellow cartoons. Cathy, Broomhilda and Blondie could form a support group (assuming none of them is the one having the affair with the dentist). Better yet, Dick Tracy could give Mrs. Patterson the name of a hired killer.

Beetle Bailey could finally put his martial arts to profitable use.

On this day in 1858 Jacques Offenbach endeared himself to posterity, particularly cartoon animators and advertising agencies, by premiering this music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXjdzlZJSpc

His Can Can music is one of the world’s most popular and exploited music. You have heard it accompany household cleansers and frantic Looney Tunes. And why not? His music is delightful and, more importantly, those studios and ad agencies don’t have to pay him a cent in royalties. When you have been dead for 127 years, you have very few legal rights. True, Offenbach would be a very rich man if he ever resurrected; but Offenbachs usually don’t don’t. (Wrong theology.)

Offenbach would also be bewildered by the reason for his acclaim. He had never intentionally composed music for the Can Can. Tres ironique, n’est-ce pas? The music we most associate with the Can Can was actually written for the operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld.” The operetta is a comic retelling of the Orpheus myth that mirrored French society at the time. In this Gallic Olympus, Zeus is a likable rogue while Hera is respectable but humorless. (It was said that the Emperor Louis Napoleon was amused, but the Empress Eugenie was not.) At the operetta’s conclusion, the Gods merrily dance off to the Underworld to the musical accompaniment of a certain tune.

The Gods may have gone to Hell, and the Second Empire certainly did (courtesy of the Richard Wagner fan club), but Offenbach’s music stayed around. It became the melodies which we most associate with night life of Fin de Siecle Paris. There is no Can Can without Offenbach.

That would have been a problem for the collaborationist Vichy Government during World War II. While it would have had no qualms about transporting Offenbach himself to an unspecified location in Poland, his music was too popular to disappear. Furthermore, the German officers in Paris would expect to see the Can Can, and Vichy would hate to disappoint them. But the dance did require music.

So was the composer of the Can Can music suddenly anonymous or had Vichy belated discovered that Saint-Saens had written it? Offenbach probably wouldn’t have been surprised; he was familiar with French farce.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Worst Day in the Stock Market. At the time, I had yet to collect my Jeopardy winnings and buy my aesthetic freedom. I was a speechwriter at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and so a witness to a surreal day in the markets. Here are my recollections of that dramatic day and its ridiculous aftermath.

The cleric, statesman and rogue Abbe Sieyes was once asked what he did during the French Revolution. He succinctly replied, “I survived.” In the aftermath of Oct. 19, 1987, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange could have expressed the same grim satisfaction.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 508 points, or 22%, that day. A panic-stricken market literally could not sell stocks fast enough; the New York Stock Exchange lacked both the technology and the nerves for the onslaught. Its stocks opened late, and throughout the day, NYSE stock quotes were either old or wishful thinking.

Yet, at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the S&P 500 futures pit opened on time. Its traders braved the deluge of sell orders and maintained a market for stock index futures. Trading volume set a record; it was twice the daily average. Frantic investors short-sold the futures, trying to protect their stock holdings against further declines. Aggressive investors also short-sold the futures; they hoped to make a profit in a collapsing market. The CME staff worked 19-hour shifts to process the transactions. By the end of that tumultuous week, a relieved CME was planning a self-congratulatory T-shirt for its traders and staff. But, while the worst was over, the absurd was just beginning.

Someone had to be blamed for the stock market crash. The media demanded it. Of course, the obvious suspect was the NYSE. Elderly Democrats still blamed the New York exchange for the Depression. So, in a wily pre-emptive strike against its detractors, Wall Street proclaimed itself the unsuspecting victim of the ruthless Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The NYSE had a rather apocalyptic interpretation of the CME action in futures that fateful week. To its mind, Henry James had been mugged by Al Capone: The selling of the futures created a cascade of plunging stock prices. Machiavellian investors shorted the futures and then sold their stocks, pressuring more investors to dump their portfolios, panicking the rest of mankind to sell everything at any price. In this way, the NYSE compared its wholesome, time-honored stocks to Chicago’s venal, reckless futures. The trust funds of innocent orphans were ruined while the brutish traders of Chicago chortled.

The media pandered to this narrative of the refined old New York market bludgeoned by a neanderthal CME. Television’s stock footage always showed the front of the NYSE, its facade of a classical temple. The public imagined the exchange as an elegant private club; amid its Edwardian decor, an Astor and a Vanderbilt might negotiate a stock price when not reminiscing about hangovers at Yale.

In contrast, the CME had a vulgar image. Stock footage depicted a pit of frenzied traders, lunging at the camera as if they could reach through the television and assault viewers. Those flailing hand signals might be amusing, but wary onlookers inferred obscene or satanic meanings. In the wake of the ‘87 crash, the integrity and purpose of stock index futures were attacked. The Wall Street Journal sneered at “Chicago’s ‘Shadow Markets,’ ” a blunt aspersion of the exchange’s integrity. The public did not understand futures or options, but it knew one thing for certain: If those markets were respectable, they would have been in New York.

The CME was not an obliging scapegoat. It held a series of press conferences and seminars to justify the value and efficiency of the futures market. Free food was provided to entice media attendance. Confronted with the CME’s detailed explanation and ponderous evidence, the reporters were bored stiff. Imagine the exchange’s predicament: Trying to teach the Black-Scholes formula for financial derivatives to an audience of English majors. The CME was asking to be hated.

Having made no favorable impression on the media, the CME was driven to irrational desperation: It hired a public relations firm. The exchange thus entrusted its reputation to flacks: people who lack the stamina for journalism, the creativity for advertising and the coordination for three-card monte. The CME chose Hill & Knowlton, a firm famous for “crisis management.” In other words, Hill & Knowlton assisted the notorious, including the Teamsters and the Church of Scientology. (As corporate luck would have it, the NYSE was also a client of the New York office of H&K. Of course, the Chicago office of H&K dismissed any possible conflict of interest.)

According to the official history of the CME (Bob Tamarkin’s The Merc: The Emergence of a Global Financial Powerhouse), H&K advised its hapless client to play the repentant sinner — namely, by confessing to an unintentional role in the crash and making an earnest plea for more federal regulation of the futures markets. Being traders, the CME leaders knew how to cut their losses in the market; however, they were not prepared to misrepresent themselves and grovel, even if that strategy would gratify the media’s prejudice.

While (according to Tamarkin) “Merc officials had lost faith in the outside public relations effort,” the exchange still hoped to make itself presentable to the doubting public. CME’s traders generally appeared as howling slobs, but the exchange’s chairman, Jack Sandner, was articulate and dapper. Taking over where H&K left off, CME’s media department booked Sandner on national television, where he could beam a congenial image of the CME across the land. This strategy was sound, but the scheduling was indiscriminate. Jack Sandner thought that he would be appearing on ABC’s Nightline. There was a significant change in format, however, and Sandner found himself on a show with the Muppets.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange gave up on public relations and resigned itself to being ugly and misunderstood. It would never be as popular or as pampered as the New York Stock Exchange.

But at least the CME stopped being the scapegoat for the October ‘87 crash. A presidential task force released the Brady Commission Report in January, 1988, and its harshest criticism was leveled at the New York Stock Exchange. The elegant old club had succumbed to panic: “As with people in a theater when someone yells ‘Fire!’ these sellers all ran for the exit in October, but it was large enough to accommodate only a few,” the report mused. Yet, the media never pilloried the NYSE. And one can see why: With such grandeur, who needs competence?

copyrighted: TheStreet.com

We have all heard “La Cucaracha”, a nonsensical Mexican song narrating the tribulations of a cockroach. In the first verse the cockroach complains of a shortage of marijuana. You wouldn’t consider it a noble or inspirational song, let alone the anthem of a historical epoch.

However, “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” is not exactly a brilliant distillation of John Locke’s treatises on the relationship between the government and the governed. Yet, “Yankee Doodle” is the song of the American Revolution. Just as incongruously, “La Cucaracha” is the song of the Mexican Revolution.

Perhaps the peasants of Mexico identified with the despised insect. For five centuries, since the Conquistadors had seized Mexico, the peasants subsisted under the feudal oppression of a Spanish aristocracy. When they rose in rebellion in 1910, they marched to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” The song said nothing about honest government or agrarian reform, the causes for which they were fighting. But the joyous vulgarity of “La Cucaracha” fully expressed the peons’ rage against the plutocratic rule, that Church-sanctioned Old Order, that had enslaved them.

By 1915, the Revolutionaries had won; and then they began fighting among themselves: the moderates, the liberals and the radicals in a free-for-all. And all the factions were singing “La Cucaracha.” When two warring armies are marching to the same song, that truly is a civil war. By 1920, most of the leaders of 1910 had been executed or assassinated; and with a depleted supply of the deluded and the ambitious, the war atrophied to peace. And “La Cucaracha” was demobilized, too.

Today, we Americanos know the song as a Marachi serenade or restaurant muzak. We wouldn’t recognize the historic significance and the implicit rage. Of course, neither did the Mexican plutocracy–until it was too late.

TURKEY TAKES STEP TOWARD IRAQ OPERATION

Associated Press
Oct 15th, 2007 | ANKARA, Turkey — The Turkish government will seek parliamentary approval for a military operation against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, a government spokesman said Monday, taking action on one of two major issues straining relations with Washington.

The United States informed Turkey that any attack on Northern Iraq would be considered an annexation of all of Iraq. “Yep,” President Bush telephoned the Turkish Premier, “You can have Iraq back. I didn’t sign this Treaty of Versace, so as far as we’re concerned you guys still own Iraq, Syria, Arabia and–well maybe you could sublet Israel. From what Cheney tells me, the Middle East was a lot better when you were running it. And between us, Ottoman Empire isn’t as silly a name as Turkey.”

Anticipating objections to the restoration of the Ottoman Empire, the White House promised to arrest Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif; the rest of the cast had the foresight to be already dead.