“THE PEOPLE’S CONGRESS:” 237 MILLIONAIRES (out of 435!)

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUTE HEADLINE MONDAY MORNING: “BANKERS POISED FOR A WINDFALL” Naked Capitalism: A BBC survey of 29.000 people in 27 countries found that significant majorities, even in the US, thought more regulation and reform was needed to rein in capitalism gone amok. Only 11% said it was fine as is. By contrast, 23% of the total deemed it to be “fatally flawed.”

SUNDAY NIGHT: BOBBY JINDAL, THE GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA, DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN THE FACE OF LATEST HURRICANE THREAT. FINGERS CROSSED!

NEWS TIP OF THE DAY: I am in Brussels, home of the EU. I have been told by a very reliable source, that Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Milliband is in line to become the Foreign Minister of Europe in January under the terms of the newly ratified Lisbon Treaty. Tony Blair is out as potential EU President. Obviously there is a big rumor mill here, but the source is a veteran political insider. Funny, I have known David forever as the son of the late Ralph Milliband, my professor and later my friend, from my days at the London School of Economics although as he rises in institutional mainstream politics, I tend to rise against it. Who knows, I may have this first. Stranger things have happened….

IN BRUSSELS, DISCUSING FINANCIAL JOURNALISM
DEMS NARROWLY PASS HEALTH CARE REFORM
THE JOYS OF CONSTANT TRAVEL

Off again.

Rebuffed in the “homeland,” marginalized in the media, I keep busy hop-scotching to a world of conferences and events, invited here and there, rarely with a fee, just travel and accommodations. I go not because I am an adventurer but because I am drawn to other countries and the chance to find outlets for my work.

I have been doing it seemingly forever. I guess it feels good to be wanted, and also can be fun, if exhausting. (Sometimes, I joke I will go to the opening of an envelope.)

Last night I skipped a good meal, a business class meal no less, because I was exhausted, drained by a day of frustration with the on-again, off again technology of movie making. I settled in to one of those state of the art moving seats with five positions including a perpendicular bed. I fiddle with the switches and suddenly felt trapped by their embrace. I am stuck. And then I am out cold. I forsake the wines and gourmet meal spelled out so invitingly in French and English.

I am sitting next to a fight attendant taking a weekend in Paris with her pilot boyfriend. She is studying some papers which turn out to be part of a course on Vetenary medicine that she is studying on the side. She has been flying for seventeen years and she’s had enough. Now she is learning how to restrain and treat sick puppies.

Like most of the women we used to call stews, she is older but no less chatty and engaging. She explains that because of all the cutbacks and furloughs, younger women are not getting jobs anymore like she once did. It is all based on seniority. She is looking around for her misplaced pricey glasses which it turns out fell into my big blanket. Fortunately I didn’t crush hers the way I keep stepping on myown.

It turns out that in her 20’s she worked in media, too, with a job with what was then AILES communications, not yet called FOX News. Yes, the one and the same! A firm run by Republican adman Roger Ailes, later Rupert Murdoch’s chosen apparatchik. He taught her communications when he was making political ads back in the late 80’s before his transformation into a “journalist.” She told me a story about being with him In New Hampshire filming messages by George Bush the senior in his political race against Michael Dukakis. Apparently it was so cold that her feet froze in ths snows of New England, one reason she got out of that business.

She told me that Ailes, a strick taskmaster, only handled the candidate’s messages and did not make the racist Willie Horton attack ad that sank the Democrats that year. It was about a rapist who had won a prison furlough under Massachusetts prison reform progran that the Governor was ultimately responsible for. It was seen as a smear job—swift boating before swiftboating —and it was effective. The same tactics would later take down another politician from Massachusetts.

Flight attendants tend to be chatty, and she was no exception, offering up a juicy tale suggesting that her then boss who runs the most moralistic network on the air, home of Beck and O’Reilly and Hannity, was, when she worked for him married and also having an affair. Media Shock!

Who am I to judge, but the way she said she found out was funny and worth repeating. She learned about it when she was having dinner with the Great media mensch (with whom I once tangled, a story told in my book The More You Watch The Less You know) and watched as he ate his meal and, then, off his girlfriend’s plate.

Woman can be so much more observant than men.

Gotcha, Roger, but given all that has happened since on the Fox Front, that was more a misdemeanor than a felony. Hope you are happy making so many of us miserable.

I am writing in a chilly cavernous train station at the Charles De Gaulle airport waiting for the train to Brussels and the conference I am going do about financial journalism I will be playing the outsider and critic, but what the hell. I will also be pushing my new book The Crime of Our Time armed with Friday’s newspaper reporting 14 more insider trading busts. I think I am on to something.

But before I can get into the substance I am jolted by the continuing reality of travel: delays. The word RETARD has now popped up next to my train. Is that a comment on me? Maybe. It means that my train is delayed; the electronic board says one hour and fifteen but the Information booth guy says it is more likely to take two hours. Thanks a lot. Nothing lie arriving at seven in the ayem and having to wait five hours. High Noon it was. I don’t even think anyone checked my ticker, but I was soon out cold.

This trip is off to a problematic start following in the wake of my recent sojourn to South Africa when I left on time but it took two days for my bag to follow. Oh, the joys….

I am so tired of bitching and moaning. I need to find a way tot transcend these anxieties and accept my fate, if that is what it is, and just dump my expectations for a more ordered world.

Hey I am in Paris, or at least at the train station here. People look different. English is a second language. I am drinking Orangina from strange contraption of a vending machine. I am looking at a toilet that costs money to take a piss in. At least it is clean. Life is good.

I just saw a woman walk by lugging a surfboard.