1/22/10
The talk over the last few days has been that Obsequious Ben Bernanke is going to have a very hard time getting confirmed for a second term as Fed Chairman. He needs sixty votes for confirmation, and there seems to be a growing, bipartisan group of senators opposing his confirmation, including Democrats Byron Dorgan, Jeff Merley, Russ Feingold, and Barbara Boxer, Republicans Jim Bunning, Jim DeMint, David Vitter, John McCain, and great American Richard Shelby, and Socialist Bernie Sanders. While Obsequious Ben has plenty of supporters, none, or at least none in the Senate, is all that vocal about it.
Some thoughts:
--Good. Now, should Obsequious Ben lose his job, or even if he doesn’t, maybe when can we give the rest of the bailout bunch their walking papers, starting with Tim Geithner and working our way through the bipartisan bureaucracy which seems to serve at the pleasure of Wall Street.
--When I think of Ben Bernanke, I am reminded of Jesus’s parable of the dishonest steward.
According to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus told the tale of a steward whose master was about to fire him for squandering the master’s property. When the steward learned that he was about to be let go, he called together those who owed his master and wrote down their debts…
“He said to the first ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ‘One hundred measures of olive oil’ ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said ‘How much do you owe?’ ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’”
The steward did this to ingratiate himself with his master’s debtors so that one of them might hire him after his service to his current master was over. One has to wonder who on earth would hire a guy who made a habit out of stealing from his employers. Perhaps the steward was seeing far into the future and envisioning the American voter, who has a habit of rehiring the same people who steal from him, and others, routinely, but that is another matter.
Ben Bernanke has behaved very much like the dishonest steward. He has effectively stolen from his master, the U.S. taxpayer, to ingratiate himself with Wall Street, and especially with counterparties of AIG, in the hopes that one of these will do something for him, either by hiring him or paying him generous and frequent “consulting” fees or “speaking” fees if he returns to academia.
The wicked steward’s master, as St. Luke tells us, commended him for acting prudently. What his master’s other actions might have been, beyond, and perhaps counter to, commendation, we are not told. While we don’t have to commend Mr. Bernanke, we at least ought to give the Obsequious Ben the credit, and the appropriate disparagement, for looking out for Number 1. And we ought to remember the guy who appointed him, George Bush, and the guy who continues to ardently support him, Barack Obama. We also ought to note the sorry Bernanke chapter at the Fed when we hear the experts rant about how “partisan” Washington has become, remembering that, when it comes to taking taxpayer money in order to take care of Wall Street, good old fashioned bipartisanship prevails in Washington. But what we ought not to do is shed a tear for Obsequious Ben, even if he does wind up losing his current gig..
POST NOTE:
I’ve never asked this before, but am compelled to do it now: Does anyone get the reference in the title to this post? I’m counting on one of my two champion reference getters to come through here, but anyone is welcome to guess.
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8 comments:
Sears?
No...but you have the idea. Sears was at 62nd and Western. Think of another business, which was once located at 59th and Western, and which was, and is, typical for that stretch of the world's longest avenue.
Thanks!
Currency Exchange?
SNR
You're on the right track, but something even more typically Western Avenue. In fact, there's an old expression that goes something like "That joint is just a typical Western Avenue...." These businesses have dominated Western Avenue, especially in the stretch from, say, Columbus Drive (around 75th) to about Gage Park on 55th, and they reappear much farther north, for decades. The reputation of those who ply this trade on Western has deteriorated over time, and it was never all that great in the first place.
Used car dealership. Duh. (Apologies to Sears employees, by the way.) But which one? Oldsmobile?
1/24/10
You’re absolutely right, but it gets even better than that. Specifically, I am talking about Ben’s Auto Sales, which was located on the northwest corner of 59th and Western and would have been perfect for Ben Bernanke. Ben, like most of the dealers on Western Avenue by that (i.e., late ‘60s, early ‘70s) time (with the notable exception of places like Burke Ford and Tony Piet Pontiac), was a used car, buy here pay here operation, more in the business of lending money at exorbitant rates than of selling cars. In fact, for outfits like Ben’s, repossession was not an unfortunate necessity; it was an anticipated and inherent component of the business model.
Two things about Ben’s that made it especially notable, though….
Its slogan, advertised on Bob Luce Wrestling and on Ben’s massive billboard facing south on Western Avenue, parallel to 59th and perpendicular to Western was….
“We Ben over backward to make a deal!”
Even better, not only did Ben’s advertise on Bob Luce Wrestling, their ads featured perhaps the two most distinguished personalities in Chicago grappling history, none other than Dick the Bruiser and Moose Cholak! In one ad, Bob Luce himself would be launching into a standard ad for Ben’s when Dick the Bruiser would walk in, looking all disheveled and say “I just got hit by a car!” Luce, looking concerned, would ask “Are you alright, Bruiser?” Bruiser would reply, “Yeah, I’m alright, Bob, but you should see the car! I think the guy should go to Ben’s Auto Sales!”
In the Cholak ad, Moose would appear on camera and we’d hear Luce’s voice in the background: “In this corner, weighing 400 pounds, Moose Cholak…Cholak!” Moose would say to the disembodied voice “I do NOT weight 400 pounds!” Then some guy would come out (It was probably Luce, but the viewer didn’t want to look all that closely.) in some very unconvincing drag and say “Hey, but you’re my kind of man!” And Moose would say something like “You’ll have better luck at Ben’s Auto Sales!”
So even though the name works well, I don’t think this is exactly the perfect post-Fed gig for Obsequious Ben Bernanke.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
What no Crusher?
1/25/10
Somehow, Ben never got around to hiring Crusher for one of his commercials. I can think of two possible, and very closely related, reasons for this.
First, the Crusher was perhaps the greatest interview in pro wrestling in the ‘60s and the ‘70s; in fact, no one, other than Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, was close, even such great East Coast stars as Bruno Sammartino and Gorilla Monsoon. In fact, Crusher was something of a nationwide phenomenon, often wrestling in such venues as Pittsburgh and Detroit, though never wrestling in New York, as far as I know. As much as we all loved Bruiser and Cholak in Chicago, and while they, too, were great interviews, Crusher was far better in front of the microphone. As such, he was more expensive than either Bruiser or Cholak and thus beyond Ben’s budget.
Second, by the time Ben’s ran its famous commercials featuring Bruiser and Cholak, Crusher was wrestling for Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association (“AWA”) out of Minneapolis, which, despite its base, had its biggest matches in Chicago. While Bruiser would occasionally make an appearance in the AWA, usually as Crusher’s tag team partner (and often as part of a three man tag team: Crusher, Bruiser, and Baron Von Raschke), and almost always in Chicago or nearby (I saw the “Wrestling Machine,” i.e., Bruiser and Crusher, as a tag team in Champaign when I was in college.), Bruiser and Cholak were both still working for Bob Luce’s federation, which either had no name or had a name that I can’t recall. By that time, Luce’s glory days were behind him and his promotion was strictly a low budget operation with its geographic scope limited to relatively small venues in Chicago and northwest Indiana; in fact, without Bruiser and Cholak, it would have been over. So Bruiser and Cholak could have been had, by that time, on the relative cheap while Crusher still retained some of his star power and thus was a bigger ticket.
Clearly, this was more of an answer than you were seeking, but give me a chance to talk about old time Chicago wrestling (or old time Chicago anything for that matter), and you will never get a short answer!
Thanks for reading and commenting.
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