While Tokyo lunches, peruse the prospectus for the Poverty Effect:
The WEALTH EFFECT Course in now concluded and is suspended indefinitely. The College records with some pride the steadily increasing Ignorance Stimulates Action Ratings (ISARs) of our students - way beyond mutual funds, into the hitherto neglected areas of Options, Futures, and Leverage. But the College also embraces our failures. We do not evade or swerve, certain in the knowledge that it is never too late to stimulate folly, however dormant and undeveloped. Sadly, your Board of Regents does take note that some candidates finished our final bull run event without incurring significant debt and, indeed most regrettably in some cases, with hoards of cash.
Fortunately, widows and orphans and those who were too late to enroll in the robust mental health diciplines of Self-Development in Greed and Complacency are now automatically registered as Fear Majors in the new POVERTY EFFECT Course. This time the class assignmments will appear to be randomized to individuals, thus maximizing dormant feelings of failure and worthlessness. Advanced students can proceed at once to the seminar sessions on Blame Assignment, and its related science, Conspiracy Theory. Examinations, as in the past, will be conducted "open book" and graded by the market. The goal for this semester is Total Destitution. Successful candidates will be awarded our famous T-shirt, "Didn't Everybody?"
OK, Class, forget your origins as mechanics and men of agriculture, down to work and obfuscation with Homework 1: You are Presidential Press Secretary and receive these notes on a discarded cocaine wrapper. Omitting any violence to the FRB Chairman, follow the directive in the last line of the passage.
"Ingrates, nasty fish head eaters, tired of trying to teach 'em democracy. Hell, JFK put Marilyn Monroe on a plate for whatsisname that dusky potentate good ole boy; LBJ gave another crowd enough cement to build the Greatest Wall Ever. We gave 'em napalm; showed 'em how to run a real Opium War; we gave 'em Citicorp cards; the American people have BLED for them. We ask 'em politely that each one drink just one lousy Coke in their whole lifetime and they are rude about that. And I get back a paltry few mil. of the US tax dollars sent their way, hardly enough to pay my lawyers' fees. And now this Honkers and Shankers Joke Bank thing has Congress all riled up. Those little people have no respect for the environment - they set fire to their own back yards and are choking in their own smog. Their human rights agenda sucks - THEY ARE MESSING WITH THE DOW! Hell, they don't even know what real US style debt is! We'll yeller peril them this time. Course, gotta be fair, those French and Brit colonialists left them with no better ambitions than to rise from hawking peanuts to peddling stolen bicycle parts (C. Northcote Parkinson - see that's the Rhodes Scholar coming out in me.) Check first with jolly Greenshorts (yeah, he might need to get found in the park too) and turn this crocka into something for our visitors and simultaneous release to our fellow Americans." |
