High Noon

[Achirri Ishmael]

[Found Poetry]

           1

 I gave 5 or 10 million

—I forget —

to Newt.

 

I said to myself,

‘Self’ —
that’s what I call myself –

‘what do you got to hide?’

 

I didn’t expect anything
to come out of it.
I never expected
any pushback,
or any criticism
of what I was doing.

 

I said to them,
‘Look, my name
could hurt you more
than it could help.’

 

I’m not used to hiding things,
and it doesn’t occur to me.
 I’m proud of my name,
my reputation,
and my family history.

I’m a classic rags-to-riches story.

 

The unions came up
and attacked me.

They implied
that I was like a Mafia don.

 

I said to them:
‘You want to reconsider?’

 

And they said,
‘No. We've already considered.
We’d like to have your money.’

 

Achirri Ishmael

Creatively adapted from “Sheldon Adelson: Inside the Mind of a Mega-donor,” Politico 9/23/2012.

 

 

[Klaus Rominger]

"In a feudal world, kings and lords are in charge. In a warring world, military strongmen are in charge. In a capitalistic world, where the world order is measured by GDP indexes and where nations form alliances based on economic cooperation - as in Asean Economic Community (AEC) - guess who the people in charge are.[?]

Someone once told me that even the president of the United States - whether Democrat or Republican - takes his cue from the Wall Street bankers, the oil merchants and the arms dealers. They decide the course of the nation, while the president and the people are kept busy wrestling over domestic issues such as abortion, gay rights and immigration.

Winston Churchill once said that "that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried". Half a century later, democracy and capitalism go together like Batman and Robin.

Think of the plot of those Hollywood sci-fi movies where nations and the world are run by corporations, while the mass are but labourers/consumers content to survive through populist handouts, occupied by games and pacified by over-the-counter drugs.

The rise of the merchants is simply the next stage in the saga of man; a stage dictated less by the might of arms and more by economic supply and demand.

There's little money left to be made in the US and Europe, but still plenty to be made in Asia. What of the AEC? Who's busy making deals in Myanmar and Cambodia? Who's consolidating power domestically and striking deals internationally? Who's ready for this brave new world?" (BKK Post 11/4/2012)

Good article form the BKK Post- Normally we would expect this kind of quality from a Hong Kong, or Singaporean newspaper- but it's strange!! Sometimes the truth can be found where we least expect it

but keep cheer- Even the best Military and Political analysts cannot always accurately predict the future :)

[John McCreery]

Bravo!