Another one bites the dust

As the clock winds down on another title-less fantasy football season, I may as well blog about it.

Sixteen years of futility! My own son, though younger than the league itself, is now a member and mocks me with his team name. Meanwhile, two other teams who have never won play for the title next week. They've waited three and two years respectively. One of them doesn't even live in this winter wonderland.

I really thought this was going to be the year. I had a high-scoring team and don't make rash moves. I'm the third winingest team all-time. The contenders are #14 and #15.

As fantasies go, this one hasn't gone as planned.

wintry mix

I haven't peeked outside to see what weather we've had, or not, but thanks to three phone calls--two automated, one sleepy human--and a handful of websites, I know for sure that the girl and I don't have school today. I'm ambivalent about starting this business already, grateful to not have to not have to drive in the slick, and oh, so sympathetic to the students and employees of the lone school on the snow cancellation lists that called in special to report they are open!

Frank Rich: Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich

By Frank Rich in the New York Times

ROD BLAGOJEVICH is the perfect holiday treat for a country fighting off depression. He gift-wraps the ugliness of corruption in the mirthful garb of farce. From a safe distance outside Illinois, it’s hard not to laugh at the “culture of Chicago,” where even the president-elect’s Senate seat is just another commodity to be bought and sold.

But the entertainment is escapist only up to a point. What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

The Republican partisans cheering Fitzgerald’s prosecution of a Democrat have forgotten his other red-letter case in this decade, his conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was far bigger prey. He was part of the White House Iraq Group, the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretenses. Because Libby was caught lying to a grand jury and federal prosecutors as well as to the public, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But President Bush commuted the sentence before he served a day.

Fitzgerald was not pleased. “It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals,” he said at the time.

Not in the Bush era, man. Though the president had earlier vowed to fire anyone involved in leaking the classified identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson — the act Libby tried to cover up by committing perjury — both Libby and his collaborator in leaking, Karl Rove, remained in place.

Accountability wasn’t remotely on Bush’s mind. If anything, he was more likely to reward malfeasance and incompetence, as exemplified by his gifting of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, L. Paul Bremer and Gen. Tommy Franks, three of the most culpable stooges of the Iraq fiasco.

Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of “personal responsibility” in which “people are accountable for their actions.” Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. In his recent exit interview with Charles Gibson, he presented himself as a passive witness to disastrous events, the Forrest Gump of his own White House. He wishes “the intelligence had been different” about W.M.D. in Iraq — as if his administration hadn’t hyped and manipulated that intelligence. As for the economic meltdown, he had this to say: “I’m sorry it’s happening, of course.”

If you want to trace the bipartisan roots of the morally bankrupt culture that has now found its culmination in our financial apocalypse, a good place to start is late 2001 and 2002, just as the White House contemplated inflating Saddam’s W.M.D. That’s when we learned about another scandal with cooked books, Enron. This was a supreme embarrassment for Bush, whose political career had been bankrolled by the Enron titan Kenneth Lay, or, as Bush nicknamed him back in Texas, “Kenny Boy.”

The chagrined president eventually convened a one-day “economic summit” photo op in August 2002 (held in Waco, Tex., lest his vacation in Crawford be disrupted). But while some perpetrators of fraud at Enron would ultimately pay a price, any lessons from its demise, including a need for safeguards, were promptly forgotten by one and all in the power centers of both federal and corporate governance.

Enron was an energy company that had diversified to trade in derivatives — financial instruments that were bets on everything from exchange rates to the weather. It was also brilliant in devising shell companies that kept hundreds of millions of dollars of debt off the company’s bottom line and away from the prying eyes of shareholders.

Regulators had failed to see the iceberg in Enron’s path and so had Enron’s own accountants at Arthur Andersen, a corporate giant whose parallel implosion had its own casualty list of some 80,000 jobs. Despite Bush’s post-Enron call for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community,” the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. Warren Buffett’s warning in 2003 that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction” was politely ignored. Much larger companies than Enron figured out how to place even bigger and more impenetrable gambles on derivatives, all the while piling up unseen debt. They built castles of air on a far grander scale than Kenny Boy could have imagined, doing so with sheer stupidity and cavalier, greed-fueled carelessness rather than fraud.

The most stupendous example as measured in dollars is Citigroup, now the recipient of potentially the biggest taxpayer bailout to date. The price tag could be some $300 billion — 20 times the proposed first installment of the scuttled Detroit bailout. Citigroup’s toxic derivatives, often tied to subprime mortgages, metastasized without appearing on the balance sheet. Both the company’s former chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, and his senior adviser, Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary, have said they didn’t know the size of the worthless holdings until they’d spiraled into the tens of billions of dollars.

Once again, regulators slept. Once again, credit-rating agencies, typified this time by Moody’s, kept giving a thumbs-up to worthless paper until it was too late. There was just so much easy money to be made, and no one wanted to be left out. As Michael Lewis concludes in his brilliant account of “the end” of Wall Street in Portfolio magazine: “Something for nothing. It never loses its charm.”

But if all bubbles and panics are alike, this one, the worst since the Great Depression, also carried the DNA of our own time. Enron had been a Citigroup client. In a now-forgotten footnote to that scandal, Rubin was discovered to have made a phone call to a former colleague in the Treasury Department to float the idea of asking credit-rating agencies to delay downgrading Enron’s debt. This inappropriate lobbying never went anywhere, but Rubin neither apologized nor learned any lessons. “I can see why that call might be questioned,” he wrote in his 2003 memoir, “but I would make it again.” He would say the same this year about his performance at Citigroup during its collapse.

The Republican side of the same tarnished coin is Phil Gramm, the former senator from Texas. Like Rubin, he helped push through banking deregulation when in government in the 1990s, then cashed in on the relaxed rules by joining the banking industry once he left Washington. Gramm is at UBS, which also binged on credit-default swaps and is now receiving a $60 billion bailout from the Swiss government.

It’s a sad snapshot of our century’s establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders’ value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far.

The Times calls its chilling investigative series on the financial failures “The Reckoning,” but the reckoning is largely for the rest of us — taxpayers, shareholders, the countless laid-off employees — not the corporate and political leaders who led us into the quagmire. It’s a replay of the Iraq equation: the troops, the Iraqi people and American taxpayers have borne the harshest costs while Bush and company retire to their McMansions.

As our outgoing president passes the buck for his failures — all that bad intelligence — so do leaders in the private and public sectors who enabled the economic debacle. Gramm has put the blame for the subprime fiasco on “predatory borrowers.” Rubin has blamed a “perfect storm” of economic factors, as has Sam Zell, the magnate who bought and maimed the Tribune newspapers in a highly leveraged financial stunt that led to a bankruptcy filing last week. Donald Trump has invoked a standard “act of God” clause to avoid paying a $40 million construction loan on his huge new project in Chicago.

After a while they all start to sound like O. J. Simpson, who when at last held accountable for some of his behavior told a Las Vegas judge this month, “In no way did I mean to hurt anybody.” Or perhaps they are channeling Donald Rumsfeld, whose famous excuse for his failure to secure post-invasion Iraq, “Stuff happens,” could be the epitaph of our age.

Our next president, like his predecessor, is promising “a new era of responsibility and accountability.” We must hope he means it. Meanwhile, we have the governor he leaves behind in Illinois to serve as our national whipping boy, the one betrayer of the public trust who could actually end up paying for his behavior. The surveillance tapes of Blagojevich are so fabulous it seems a tragedy we don’t have similar audio records of the bigger fish who have wrecked the country. But in these hard times we’ll take what we can get.

worse instead of better

I walk up to him, hands shoved in my back pockets, and wait for him to notice.

"What are you doing here?" he asks, off guard.

"I apologize." I do.

"Nah." He brushes it off. "I'm screwin' up."

I can't disagree. "Well, I don't think I helped," I reply, knowing that I didn't. He continues scribbling out some paper up against his locker, and I realize what he's doing.

"Now you're out here copying?" I sigh. I'll deal with this part later.

"It's extra credit. It's all I can do now." I object, and remind him of the time.

"You still have 40 minutes," I say feebly, "You could still do it," but I know there's no chance today. He's not going to retrieve his half-finished test, and he's not going to try. My earlier outburst guaranteed that. It's not on me that he was unprepared, again, but confirming his worst instincts is. Everything I said may have been true, but it wasn't the time to say it. If only frustration didn't have a short fuse.

I head back to my room, leaving my mess in the hall.

"You're better than that," I call to him. I repeat the words to myself.

A Pre-Christmas Miracle

Here's what I don't get

Springfield is the capital of Illinois, right? Why is governor big hair in Chicago?

Leaving, on a jet plane

A 72-second animation of every flight in the world over a 24 hour period.

The Land of Crooks and Greed

image by Ronald J. Cala, NY Times

All things considered, I would rather it had been hookers.

hope

It is the best thing that's ever happened to her. May that not always be true. May this be a beginning, not an ending. A first step, not a final chapter. I see her pride in the scrubs that she wears, and I cross my fingers again.

She's not a nurse, or an aide, or an anything, not yet. She's a student at the tech school, studying Health Related Occupations five mornings every week. Those teachers have their students dress the part, follow the rules for hair and jewelry and nail polish. Get into the habit. She's always wanted to be a nurse, and this feels like a real step. It is a confirmation. One that may be thwarted.

She has a father with a real green card, but his whereabouts are unknown. She has a social security number that is real but may not be valid. She has a mother who would prefer she study cosmetology over nursing; haircuts can be paid for in cash. She has no clear path.

In the afternoons, we look for scholarships that don't require citizenship. We calculate how far we can push the system. The year is half over and the rest will go quick; there's little time to figure this out. It may come to nothing, but not if we can help it. In the meantime, she learns and practices. A dream close enough to touch.

undue influence

"I was scared of what you said, so I didn't go."

I consider the implications. "Well, good. " I am amused and satisfied.

"It was just me who didn't go," he said, trying to minimize. I shrug back at the boy who's feeling stupid for staying away from someplace he should not have been, not that anything really came of it, but we didn't know that at the time.

Sometimes I forget how much they do believe me. Friday, word got around that a June grad was having a birthday party in a hotel. Obviously, no good was gonna come. So obviously, some of them were planning.

Out of the blue, in the midst of the talk, I said, "I think I'll call the cops." I'm getting better at the straight face, kept it through all the wonder and exclaiming. When they asked why, I let them fill in their own blanks. Raised an eyebrow, waited. Repeated. A second thought certainly couldn't hurt. Just because I would have done it doesn't mean they should.

In the end, I didn't. I had no concrete information, and in the end my job was done. All I really wanted, not that I really thought it out, was for someone to make a smarter decision. And against his will, one did.

And so it begins

Happy Holidays from InBev.

Visitors

"I thought I'd never see you again."

I concur. Shrug my shoulders. "Life happens." He's a good kid, and it's good to see him, never again contracted into a year and a half.

It's Friday afternoon, and we're standing there smiling on our accustomed sides of the desk. Ballcap and ripped jeans, hands shoved into pockets, he could easily fit in here. It hasn't been that long. Just long enough for my image of him to crystalize into something that isn't now and never was, exactly. A composite of all those years. I'm glad for the refresher.

"I was shy to come in when all the kids were here," he says, and I think, "How different from your sister." She's here, too, on the phone for the fifth time in four minutes, the center of attention as always, as ever, from all that eyeliner down to her spike heels. She's the diva who nonetheless brought me her brother, the one who insisted that he come.

The three of us gossip and catch up; I am blunt with my advice. I look but see none of his rumored tattoos and piercings, though I realize they could be hidden. I wonder what I'm not seeing. He says more about his drive home than about the Juarez drug war he's witnessed. He's invincible nineteen and he's talking to his teacher; there are limits, but still we're connected.

Soon enough it's time to go, and I gather up my things.

"Okay, Ms. P., we'll let you get back to your life." I laugh at that half-truth and give her my card.

"It was good to see you," he calls. I agree, wholeheartedly. And then I watch them head back out into the world.

Michael Moore makes perfect sense, if only they'd listen

Moore can also be found here.

Kid gloves

It never ceases to amaze me how two children born of the same parents can be so different. Not good and bad, although both have been each at one time or another, just different. It's taken me all of 15 1/2 years -- give or take -- to learn you can't parent them the same way either. Also, I recently discovered, my "tough love" approach worked for neither.

So I'm experimenting with a "kid glove" approach. Ignoring the fact that I communicated via e-mail, only because I worked late and they were asleep when I got home, how did I do on report card day?

First, the straight-A sixth-grader:

Way to go! I was so proud and impressed when I looked at your report card tonight. Of course, I wasn't surprised after seeing your continued stellar ITBS scores. Your mathematics total equates to a student in your brother's grade! And your problem solving and data interpretation scores are off the chart. Maybe you will be president some day -- or a detective like Nancy Drew.

Anyway, congratulations. You've done very well. Now keep it up.

Your reward? I don't believe in paying for grades and, though we set up a plan for Zach, it wasn't until he was in high school. (So far, it hasn't provided him much incentive anyway.) But we should discuss an appropriate reward for your accomplishment. What do you think? I'm sure you have ideas. Let's talk about it.

Meanwhile, remember I love you no matter what. And at the moment, you've made me
very, very proud.

Now, the underachieving 10th-grader:

Don't worry. I'm not going to yell at you. I've learned that doesn't accomplish the intended goal. I'm trying to look at the positives and I have to say, you kept your word about getting your geometry grade up. Good job! Unfortunately, it seems to have come at the expense of your Spanish grade. Not exactly what we're looking for.

I hope you will take Mrs. Stiles comment to heart and "report for extra help."

Your GPA of 2.715 isn't horrible. But 3.0 is well within your reach, and I hope
you'll strive for that this trimester.

The C+ in driver's ed kind of surprised me. I guess you should have taken it pass/fail. Regardless, it's good to have it out of the way. Now you won't have it to distract you from your other studies. You need to find out the procedures for getting a school permit and we'll get that done. I still don't know what we'll do for a vehicle, but we'll work on it.

Financially, here's how the payout works (PE and Driver's ed do not count). $10 for each A that isn't canceled by a D. $5 for each B that isn't canceled out by a C. Obviously, straight A's or A's and B's is not applicable. So your A- in Biology is canceled by the D+ in Spanish, or you'd have earned $10. The B+ in LA (though I'm really proud of you improvement in this class) is canceled by the C- in Geometry. That leaves a B- in world history, for which you've earned a grand total of $5. I think you can easily see how eliminating the D's and reducing/eliminating the C's would be much more profitable.

I would like for us to meet with your counselor to discuss your educational goals. If you'd rather meet with her alone, that is fine, as long as you do it. Please let me know how you'd like to proceed.

Keep working hard, buddy, and don't slack off between now and Christmas break. You've learned how hard it is to make up ground when you've fallen behind. And please, please, please make sure you turn in all of your assignments.

Don't be afraid to ask for help, whether from your teachers, your classmates or even your parents. We love you and only want the best for you.

secondhand suckitude

Being a public school teacher is not exactly like having a real job, or at least not like working for a business. Regardless of anything out of my control, I know I'll be paid until next August, and, given the tenure, for many Augusts after that, barring some cataclysm. I'm not immune to the coming Depression, of course, especially given the source of the rest of the household income, but my economic wariness has been a little abstract, a little theoretical. No more.

I have this friend in the steel business, see, a friend as close as a sister, and it turns out her December bonus is the news that her place of employment may not continue to exist in the way it most always has. It's news as logical as it is jarring. If fewer cars and appliances are being sold and fewer buildings are being built, naturally less steel is ordered, and consequently less steel is produced. Fewer workers are needed at every step along the way;that's the trickle-down reality. And wow, does it ever suck.

It may be that things will be fine, both for my friend and her work community, but it doesn't seem they'll ever be the same. Even I've been saying that for a while now, in a big picture kind of way. It's just that now I understand what I meant.

Pitts: Our destructive love of stuff

By LEONARD PITTS JR.

I like stuff as much as the next guy. My closet is stuffed with stuff, my shelves groan with stuff, boxes full of stuff jam my garage. I like stuff just fine.
But I would not kill for it.

Last week, a 34-year-old man was trampled to death by a mob rushing into a Wal-Mart to buy stuff. Jdimytai Damour was a seasonal worker manning the door of a store in Valley Stream, N.Y., as shoppers eager for so-called ''Black Friday'' bargains massed outside. The store was scheduled to open at 5 a.m., but that was not early enough for the 2,000 would-be shoppers. At five minutes before the hour, they were banging their fists and pressing their weight against the glass doors, which bowed and then broke in a shower of glass. The mob stormed in.

Four people, including a pregnant woman, were injured. And Damour was killed as people stomped over him, looking for good prices on DVDs, winter coats and PlayStations. Nor was the mob sobered by his death. As authorities sought to clear the store, some defiantly kept shopping; others complained that they had been on line since the night before.

And here, it seems appropriate to observe the obvious irony: Black Friday is the traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season, Christmas being the holiday when, Christians believe, hope was born into the world in the form of a baby who became a man who preached a gospel of service to, and compassion for, our fellow human beings.

It is hard to see evidence of either in the mob's treatment of Jdimytai Damour, and if your inclination is to heap scorn upon them, I don't blame you. But I would caution against regarding them as freaks or aberrations whose callous madness would never be seen in sane and normal people like ourselves. That would be false comfort.

You may think I'm talking about mob psychology and to a degree, I am. From soccer riots to the Holocaust itself, human beings have always had a tendency to lose individual identity and accountability when gathered in groups. You will do things as part of a crowd that you never would as an individual. Theoretically, anyone who lacked a strong-enough moral center and sense of self could have been part of that mob in Valley Stream.

But it's not just our common vulnerability to mob psychology that ties the rest of us to last week's tragedy. It is also our common love of stuff. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a starker illustration of our true priorities. Oh, we pay lip service to other things. We say children are a priority, but when did people ever press against the door for Parents' Night at school? We say education is a priority, but when did people ever bang against the windows of the library? We say faith is a priority, but when did people ever surge into a temple of worship as eagerly as they do a temple of commerce?

No, sale prices on iPods, that's our true priority. Jdimytai Damour died because too many of us have bought, heart and soul, into the great lie of American consumerism: acquiring stuff will make you whole. ''You, Happier,'' is how a sign at my local Best Buy puts it. As if owning a Jonas Brothers CD, an Iron Man DVD, a Sony HDTV, will elevate you to a level of joy otherwise impossible to attain. Hey, you may be a total loser, may not have a friend, may not have an education, may not have a job, may not have a clue, but it will all be OK as soon as you get that new Canon digital camera, especially if you get it for 50 percent off.

It would be nice to think -- I will not hold my breath -- that Damour's death would lead at least some of us to finally see that for the obscene lie it is, to realize that seeking wholeness in consumer goods is an act of emptiness, not joy.

You, Happier? No.

Just you, with more stuff.

dinner

"No, it's not closed. We're inside at a table."

I walk towards the front of the near-empty restaurant, talking on the phone.

"Am I looking at you sitting in your truck?" It soon becomes clear that I am. As I gather her in, my teacher friend and I tease, but not too much. I agree that the open sign is off and that the parking lot is fairly deserted. But c'mon. "Couldn't you try the door?"

"That's enough laughing!" She protests, but she's smiling. It elicits another giggle. Soon she'll know us better; I'm glad she wanted to come.

She's more or less grown up now; she runs a store her father owns, she's raising her motherless sister. She has as much responsibility as anyone. More. But she still wants to call us "Mrs.", and she's still shy to come to the door.

And thus we have adopted her, kind of. There is no overt plan. No conversation about it at all, really. Just a notion to invite her, a quick response. A teenager in gold jewelry and a cloud of perfume, waiting in her truck.

A Garbo Moment

Here at the end of the day I would like credit for not screaming at the top of my lungs.

Teenagers are teenagers. Today was no day in particular; nothing much went wrong. I didn't get frustrated. I kept my sense of humor. I didn't bring the room to silence with called-for-or-not harsh words. Everybody was here and everybody pretty much did as they were told. But nobody left me alone. I seem to have reached my limit.

"Ms. P!"

"Ms. P!"

"Ms. P!"

"Ms. P!"

"Ms. P!"

"Yes." "Yes." "Yes?" "Yes." "Yes!"

Don't they have anywhere else to go? I mean, I KNOW they do. I have proof written and digital. But every time I turn around, they're back again. AGAIN. I'm pretty sure some of them never leave.

Even when I lock the door and pretend to be gone, they knock. When I don't answer and sneak out for lunch they must conduct surveillance, for when I return, they're waiting for me, a gauntlet by the door.

"Hello! I have a test."

"Hello! I have a pass."

"Hello! I brought my lunch."

"Hello!" and an accusation: "Where were you? We were here!"

No doubt!

the boys

"My advice to you," I call across to the back table, "is not to listen to a thing they say." Two members of the South American contingent are trying to persuade a kid who was, until just lately, a walking, talking Asian stereotype (so quiet, so studious) to ask some Korean girl out. As if they haven't corrupted him enough already.

"I have heard all their sad stories," I continue, as they blush and grin. "And I seriously would not listen to a word they say." We're waiting for the bell.

"That's right!" says the instigator, with a note of recognition. "We all tell our girl problems to Ms. P. That's what you should do, too!"

I roll my eyes for their benefit and turn to the senior girl beside me: "Like I have time for any more free therapy." We laugh in solidarity that may or may not be appropriate. I don't even know any more. "I should charge by the hour!" I push back from my desk and head to testosterone corner, where I'm greeted with a recap.

"See, he likes this girl. . ."

"No, he doesn't." I've already heard his protests, and besides, it's time to barge in. "He likes geometry, just like you." I sit down by the board and draw triangles. Geometric, not romantic. We work the problems, and somehow, they get it.

My Lucky Day

It wasn't, really. So many things went wrong by 7:30 this morning that I had my first block kids imagine their own "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad" days for a journal assignment as I fixed the jammed printer, weeded through the crap left by last week's last-minute sub (the one who called me to confirm DIDN'T SHOW) and got the stuff together that I would have done before the bell had I not been 35 minutes later than intended because of a stalled garbage truck. (I'll skip the part about the crack-of-dawn computer problems, the misplaced phone, and the coat I couldn't find because I'd left it hanging on the door to the garage so as to streamline my morning.) It did get better. I didn't get anything done, but I had fun with some kids. And now I'm really smiling.