Steven L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel

August 14, 2010

Steven L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33316

RE: Tonight’s History lesson

My dear Professor,

“Anticipation [being] the greater joy”, I was counting the hours ‘til I could read your Sunday Jeremiad about how bad things are, how bad things will be, and why those things are so bad.

Bush is the reason for teenage obesity, the increase of pythons in the swamp West of Sawgrass Mall, and the failure of manatees to secure full suffrage. Truth be known it was Reagan who put us on the slippery slope to terminal chilling effects. A closer examination will tell us that it was Nixon who fell victim to the Tri-Lateralists and the Bilderbergs when he went to China. OSHA and the EPA were just covers to deflect a young Goldstein from the true course of mammon driven Republicans, that course being to make life miserable for the more sensitive among us. If we were to dig deeply enough we would find that the Republicans started the War of Jenkin’s Ear plus the Black Death.
Karl Rove is responsible for Guy Fawkes. There are rumors that the Republicans encouraged Hannibal and then whacked Caesar, Pompey, and Cicero. Halliburton’s predecessor caused the flood made famous by Noah, the Old Testament PETA shill. True believers know that Othello was done in be Lee Atwater as part of an expanded Southern strategy. That you were able to discover all this and not throw yourself from a lofty tor wailing in despair is a testament to “the triumph of hope over experience”.

I tell you this because regardless of what you will say on Sunday. I feel duty bound to report on the President’s radio address today.

Let me begin by saying that he is the best President we have.

His speech mentioned Social Security and how the Republicans want to bankrupt it so the Chinese can take over. There’s a WAL*MART angle in there but I haven’t quite figured it our yet.

I feel duty bound to tell you that are only two of us left in Broward County who understand the flim, the flam, the flummery, and the flummoxing of Social Security. Actuarial considerations aside, the main even happened in 1964. By telling you what happened I increase the number of people in the know by 50%. You will become a member of the original Truthers.

That was the year that the United States government, the guys who work for us, the guys who do what we tell them, cooked the books. All money coming into the Treasury heretofore earmarked for Social Security was diverted into the general fund of the Treasury. The Social Security administration took back an IOU, a chit, a marker, that said it could be cashed in at some future date.

“Book cooking” was raised to an art form in the late ‘90s by HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Congressman Barfey Frank. They forced a very eager Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae to accommodate the creation of mortgage pools filled with toxic wastes that would make Chernobyl seem like Martha’s Vineyard. They then filled both sewers with refugees from the Clinton administration. The one common business experience these grifters and poltroons had was their ability to swallow their pride when asking for help when they stole hot stoves.

That’s one Hell of a lock box.

Since you work for a company – The Tribune Company – that is in bankruptcy you should be aware that the Trustee did a very thorough investigation of where your pension money was. If he thought it was commingled with corporate funds, if he thought it had been used to buy securities of the parent, people would have been led out in chains. That is the law of the land. It applies to everybody. Almost. Too bad it didn’t apply to the United States government.

Now we have more money going out than we have coming in.

If we cash in the markers being held by the Social Security trustees they will have to get approval from our friends the Chinese before they pay them.

We dug ourselves into the hole we are in. The first thing we have to do is stop digging.


August 15, 2010

Sunday morning at last!

There are two things that can always, always be said of proud, loud, card carrying modern American Liberals. THEY NEVER LET YOU DOWN. The other thing is that they all suffer from Stage X of “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”.

Your wailing screed about the state sales tax holiday is both interesting and new. Alas, that which is interesting is not new while that which is new is not interesting.

You say, and may I add “rightfully so”, that the exemptions from the Florida sales tax are both confusing and offensive to Logic. You point out that they are typically idiotic in a manner that only a government cabal of mind numbing bureaucrats – Did I just repeat myself? – can assemble. Behind the curtain is a wanabee Professor Irwin Corey beside himself in ecstasy at what two or three sentences can do to make sense into nonsense. I risk being thought of as a cad if I point out that only people who favor government control of every nitpicking thing we do, people like you, can say such bosh and twaddle and keep control of their bladders. I think. Maybe. It depends.

There are two teachable moments here.

#1 – “Lest we forget”, as Kipling, the first great multi-cultural poet said, all those imbecilic exemptions, all those contradictions didn’t break in one night and slip into the state tax code like MERSA. They did not spring fully grown from Zeus’s forehead into black and white fiats. Line by line, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word they are in there because someone wanted them in there.

Before you get your tighty whities in a blue lipped snick over lobbyists bribing legislators with dollars, grog, recreational pharmaceuticals, lithe lads or lassies, think about the First Amendment. I don’t have to have a “wise Latina” tell me what the words “Congress shall make no law…abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” mean.

They codified a natural right, a right that was ours at birth, “a right from beyond the stars”. Can we gild a lily?

If you have knowledge of a specific act, of a pattern of criminality you are duty bound to “drop a dime”, to report it the nearest competent authority. Failure to do so will consign you to one of Dante’s lower circles.

#2 – The Declaration of Independence, another document more quoted than read, addresses your vexatious bugbear specifically.

“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
swarms of officers, to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

As Professor Emeritus of the Harriet Van Horne Chair of “Another lash on the backs of the Poor” and as a most visible supporter of women and minorities particularly single moms who are women of color with children in need of a good Ritalin program who don’t have the benefits of Midnight Basketball how can you say that they shouldn’t have the cash benefit of sales tax free weekend?

Maybe they could use the savings to super size Sunday dinner.



Kevin Smith