I'm Crazy Georgie! My prices are I-N-S-A-N-E!by arendt
...."I'm Crazy Eddie! My prices are I-N-S-A-N-E!"
....If you were anywhere near the East Coast in the 1980s, you undoubtedly saw those TV
....commercials. The raucous ads saturated the airwaves in the tri-state area and helped
....Crazy Eddie's quickly become the dominant consumer electronics retailer in New York,
....New Jersey and Connecticut.
....As it turned out, "Crazy" Eddie Antar, who was behind one of the twentieth century's
....most infamous financial statement frauds, wasn't crazy at all—just crooked...The real
....Eddie Antar didn't have time for acting. He and members of his family were too busy
....engineering a $120 million rip-off. Much of the ill-gotten loot was placed in secret
....overseas bank accounts. Once discovered, Antar spent several years on the lam and
....another several behind bars. According to a senior SEC official, "This may not be the
....biggest fraud of all time, but for outrageousness, it is going to be very hard to beat." - Joseph T. Wells, "So That's Why its Called a Pyramid Scheme"
....at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, October, 2000.
....
http://www.acfe.com/fraud/view.asp?ArticleID=31Well, it looks like the folks at the ACFE have a new winner for outrageous pyramid scheming:
George W. Bush and his I-N-S-A-N-E giveaway prices on the American government and the
American middle class. He is literally giving away the fruits of 200 years of American labor to transnational corporations and insider billionaires - to anyone who can pay his insanely low prices.
Now, Jill Consumer (nee Citizen) can't afford these prices, but the rich and powerful can.
As the saying goes in Washington: a million buys a billion. That is, a million dollars of lobbying
buys a billion dollars worth of government largesse. That largesse may be corporate welfare, bridges
to nowhere, targeted tax exemptions, R&D credits, whatever. Its all a big pig trough to Crazy
Georgie.
Just like any Pyramid Scheme, the customers get a good deal, too good a deal; and the
creditors get screwed. In Georgie's case, the screwees are the American middle class and
their SOL descendents ad infinitum.
As Josh Marshall noted during the 2003 Medicare Bill, Georgie is running a "bustout". A bustout happens
when the mob gets control of a legitimate business. They immediately start giving inventory away to
their partners in crime. Then they use the good credit of the existing business to stock up on lots more
inventory, which they have no intention of paying for. Having handled the input side, they now
move to the output side. They stop paying their bills. They milk this scheme as long as possible,
then bail out, leaving the gutted husk of the business behind.
If I had more time, I would do a commercial:
....Weather Service Privatization - a few million to Rick Santorum
....Energy Ponzi Schemes ala Enron - a few tens of milliions from Ken Lay
....Get out of Jail Free card for above - price yet to be determined
....$250M bridges to nowhere - whatever it costs to medicate Ted Stevens
....$50B more tax cuts for the rich - $70B of program cuts for the rest of us
....
(feel free to add your item here!! - arendt)....All these deals and more. Make me an offer. No offer is too crazy to reject. After all, I'm in
....a bit of a jam right now, and I need some more cash to buy my way out.
----
I think that Bush as a sweet-talking, "just folks" con man should resonate with even the dumbest WalMart shopper. They sure see enough of that type in their wretched existence. I guess they are
resigned to always being cheated. So ends the American middle class. Democracy stolen and their
treasury looted because they were too busy getting a deal on a toaster oven at Target.
You want some real irony? It turns out that Michael Chertoff, the new head of Fatherland Security,
made his name as the prosecutor of Crazy Eddie. It appears that, in the tradition of self-made
con-men everywhere, he has put to good use the lessons he learned from those who went
before him. By published accounts, DHS is a morass of style-over-substance bureaucracy busy
handing out no-oversight contracts to the usual suspects in the Bush Crime Family.
Stick in a fork. America is done.