Spare Change?

You better start saving those pennies

by Alan Bisbort

Source: Hartford Advocate, June 2, 2005.

Remember when your mother tossed out your baseball card collection, your comic books AND your signed poster of the Bay City Rollers? At the time you thought she'd merely deep-sixed a treasured part of your childhood and the pain lingered for a few days, eventually to be absorbed by more contemporary annoyances with bosses, neighbors, television programming, etc. Occasionally, the memory would resurface when you heard about someone selling a Gus Triandos rookie card for $75 or unloading their Fantastic Fours on eBay for a couple thousand bucks or sending their kid to Harvard with the proceeds from that Bay City Rollers poster.

And yet, it turns out to be worse than you, or your mother, realized. Dear old Mom not only severed the link to your precious memories, she more than likely consigned you in your old age to a diet of off-brand cat food and two-day-old bread crusts. Because: in the future world of Republican privatization, those baseball cards and comic books will constitute the sum total of your retirement nest egg.

You think I jest?

A story that came out of Ohio last week confirms that Republicans are playing it fast and easy with our future. That is, it was learned by reporters at the Toledo Blade that the state agency in charge of paying medical bills and providing monthly checks to state workers injured on the job has invested $50 million of its operating budget in rare coins. Rare indeed is it when reporters actually do their jobs these days, but these Blade reporters were the rarest of the rare: they asked questions intended to get to the bottom of the story.

And down there at the bottom of this story, down among the polyps, microbes and mad-cow prions, resides a rare-coin dealer in Toledo named Tom Noe. Noe was, yes, one of the top fund-raisers in Ohio for the Bush reelection campaign. He was what Bush-Cheney folks call a "pioneer," meaning he raised up to $250,000 for their efforts toward permanent war and deficits. Ohio is the state, you may recall, where Wally O'Dell, another valued Republican "pioneer," lives. O'Dell was the man who wrote to the RNC, prior to the election, that "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

O'Dell made good on that commitment. O'Dell owns and operates Diebold, the company that makes touch-screen voting machines, the ones without a paper trail, the ones that have proven to be susceptible to hacking and fraud, the ones that will eventually be installed in every American voting precinct to assure that all election results will be open to debate and that in the future you will hear variations on the following: "oh, so sorry, your candidate lost to the Republican again … and it was so close, well, nice try, see you in four years …"

You may also recall that there was a bit of a dustup last November over voting discrepancies in Ohio, the state's tainted electoral votes being nonetheless awarded to Bush, putting him over the "reelection" hump. The decision to invest in rare coins and to give money to Noe was approved by Ken Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state and the man responsible for signing off on the vote count, despite pending lawsuits. For the full sordid story, see What Went Wrong in Ohio, the new report (with a blistering preface by Gore Vidal) based on official testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Conyers will one day be seen as a real hero and patriot for bucking the Republican power brokers and the spineless leadership of his own party to get at the truth.

Ah, but here's the real rub about those rare coins in Ohio. A state audit found that as much as $12 million of that $50 million "investment" — funds intended to pay worker's compensation claims — is unaccounted for, leading to speculation that Noe funnelled it back into Republican Party coffers. In other words — and let's not beat around the Bush — Republican hacks stole $12 million from state taxpayers, Republican AND Democrat, and are still walking the streets. When this happened in Connecticut — the quid pro quo Republican con game scoring $224 million for Enron subsidiary CRRA — the governor was sent to prison.

In Ohio, meanwhile, the probe is ongoing, but with a Republican as the prosecuting attorney and Ken Blackwell as secretary of state (and a leading candidate for governor), the truth will never come to light. It's buried somewhere near Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Stuff like this makes me think that the Republicans are the real terrorists undermining, dividing and destroying America. It's either a testament to boundless optimism or total ignorance that even 41 percent of Americans still "approve" of the job Bush is doing.

As for me, I'm banking on that original vinyl copy of the Stones' Sticky Fingers, with the Andy Warhol zipper, getting my son through Yale.

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reprinted from The Hartford Advocate