The Sharpeyed Chicken Network

The Sharp-eyed Chicken Network

“The Sharp-eyed Chicken Network is on the air! What’s that you say? What’s a Sharp-eyed Chicken? Well, you know, we chickens have to have sharp eyes too, so we can see those hawks and eagles coming from a long way off…. ‘Cause there’s a whole lot more of us than there are of them. And you’re listenin’ to one angry rooster. You may not know it, but chickens were first domesticated in Southeast Asia, not as food, but for their fighting ability., their ferocious, tenacious spirit. When they’re not incarcerated in tiny cages or over-crowded, filthy coops, even hens are fiercely territorial.

“Somehow or other, the folks at this station have graciously agreed that it’s time we had a voice on the air. They may learn to regret it, but until they do, we’re going to have some fun, fighting back against those for whom enough is never enough, those who take our good nature for weakness and stupidity, as a green light for continuing to use their money and power to keep us down.

“In a little while, we’re going to open up the phone lines, but this program is going to be different from anything you’ve ever heard, so I need a little time to set the stage, you might say. The number to call is 1-800-CHICKEN, or, for those of you who like numerals better, 1-800-244-2536. For openers, you need to know that this is not about any of the political parties or protest movements already on the scene. To put it mildly, they have blown it. They have no credibility. Lots of talk, very little action. Our democracy, perhaps even the concept of democracy itself, is on life-support. In The Republic, Plato said that democracy was the most degenerate form of government, Of course, he was witness to the first working attempt at democracy, and he could see its failings. He said the most serious problem was that democracy assumes that all people (of course, he said ‘all men,’ but even our founders never dreamed of universal suffrage) are equally capable of self-government. Given that, he said, clever sophists (we call them ‘Spin Doctors’) would encourage what he called the baser appetites, leading to a dissolute society, ripe for dangerous demagogues with evil intentions. Sound familiar?
“Speaking of our Founding Fathers, as so many are wont to do these days, they were well aware of Plato’s warnings and of the failure of Greek democracy. For this reason, they created a Republic, that is, a government of Representatives, something like the Guardian Class Plato described in The Republic, a group of better educated, better informed citizens, who would make the important decisions for us, then attempt to justify those decisions when it was time to seek re-election. At the same time, the Founders were acutely aware of the potential for corruption of the Representatives by financial interests. They were rebelling, after all, against a corrupt, inept English Monarch. Hmmm…. Corruption of the Representatives by money, ignorant, frightened voters following dangerous demagogues. Welcome to 21st Century America!

“A little hint – as long as I’m on the air, I’ll be signing off by saying, ‘How bad does it have to get?’ The bad news it that it obviously has to get a lot worse before it can get better. The good news is that things are getting worse all the time. Well, maybe it’s not really ‘good news,’ because that depends on how we, the people, choose to clean up the mess. History is littered with the dregs of societies that made the wrong choices when things finally got so bad that folks were willing to consider real change. By the way, a working-class philosopher now largely forgotten, Eric Hoffer, wrote a book more than half a century ago, called The Ordeal of Change. Hoffer wrote that comfortable people don’t want change, To quote him: “A population subject to drastic change is a population of misfits – unbalanced, explosive and hungry for change.” Well, that certainly describes the Tea Party, doesn’t it? But is that really the change we want? The dismantling of Social Security, Medicare and the rest of the Social Safety net? No regulation of food and workplace safety? No protection from economic predators? An environment left to the mercy of the profit motive? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

“I’ll give you a couple of minutes to think about what I’ve been saying while we pause to pay some of the bills.”

“Not bad, Chappy! Not bad at all.” The voice in my ear is Ted, my producer. I’m thinking the same thing, not bad at all. Can’t really believe, after all these years of trying to break through the wall, that I’m finally here, doing what I know I’ve always been meant to do, getting paid to shoot my big mouth off in public. Sure, it’s only a drab, little studio, in a second-rate radio station, but it’s a start, and I’m determined to take advantage of this opening to get their attention and start something big.

“The phones are already lighting up, Chappy. What kind of calls do you want to start off with. It could make a big difference.”

“You know, Ted, I think we should begin with the more rational callers, even those who agree with what I’m saying. Later, we can take on the loonies, because I do want to show that I can deal with them, even relate to them. But for now, we should probably keep it low-key.

“I’m sure you’re right, buddy. I’ll screen them for you.”

“I’m back. While we’re on the subject of our friends in the Tea Party, we need to remember that they are our friends. If our friends were only those who agree with us, life would be pretty boring, don’t you think. Besides, the primary idea behind the Tea Party is right on. The truth is that our government hasn’t represented us for a long time. I like to say that there are, of course, two parties in Washington, but the real parties are not the Republicrats and the Demicans. The real parties are the Money Party and the People Party, and there are only a handful of folks in the People Party: Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kusinich, Barbara Lee, and a few part-timers. The rest represent money and those who have it, in order to finance their endless re-election campaigns. Just as our Founding Fathers feared. Oh, some of them know how tosay the right things, politicians are professional equivocators, after all. But, when push comes to shove, they always have an excuse for voting with the Money Party. Bail out the Bankers and Wall Street. Screw Main Street. Sooner or later, some of the money will trickle down to us and we’ll get back to work, even if its for lower wages and less benefits. Healthcare? As long as it doesn’t hurt the profits of Insurance companies and drug makers. Financial regulations? Don’t worry, the bankers will hire good lawyers and the regulators will look the other way.

“How about it? Am I the only person angry about this? Let me know. Ah, we have a caller: Your name, please?”

“This is George, from Berkeley. You’re not the only one, let me tell you. Everybody I know is as mad as you are about this. But, my question is, what are you suggesting we do about it? I’ll take my answer on the air.”

“Well, George, from Berkeley, eh? How fitting that my first call would come from that hotbed of radical ideas. And your question is well asked, my friend. What can we do about it? That is the big question. No doubt about it. Let me start by saying that my own heroes in this field are Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. A few years ago, I had an essay published in a national magazine called The Progressive Christian asking the question, ‘What Would MLK JR Do?’ It was a takeoff on the bumper sticker WWJD? (What would Jesus do?) that Bush used to claim was his guiding principle. I said that we really can’t be sure what Jesus would do – he died 2000 years ago, and nowadays there is a lot of controversy about what he actually did say and do, but we sure as hell do know what Martin would be doing if he were here. He would be organizing massive civil disobedience and nonviolent action. You may know, and should if you don’t, that he was as opposed to economic injustice and bad wars as he was against racial discrimination, because he understood that they were all connected.

“Now, I can understand why nobody is stepping forward to fill his shoes, because we know what happened to him and to Gandhi, and, for that matter, to Jesus, who inspired both of them. The powers that be have ways of dealing with those who seriously threaten their privileges. They seldom have to do the dirty work themselves, because there is always a Roman Governor or a religious nut or a honkie with a gun who will do the job for them. They just have to create a climate of fear and anger. Again I ask, does that sound familiar? And, lest there be any doubt, I’m not volunteering for the job, either. But the answer to your question, George, is that someone has to be willing to take that risk, because Power only respects equal and opposite Power. Nothing less. Demonstrations, columns, articles, books, marches, documentaries, none of them are anything more than political masturbation. Temporary relief, no real consequences.”

“I see we have another caller: Your name, please?”

“My name is Mary, and I’m calling from Mill Valley. When you talk about nonviolent action, I get confused. Lots of people talk about non-violence, but I don’t understand how that can create the kind of power that will get the attention of those who hold the real power. As far as I can tell, revolutions just replace one set of power junkies with a different group of power junkies, often with pretty violent consequences sooner or later. How can we expect it to be different this time?”

“Another great question! I love living in the Bay Area. We have this island of sanity in a really crazy world. Of course, there isn’t any easy answer, but I do have some ideas to offer. One of the things that really got me going on getting this program started was a book I read recently, called God’s Politics. The author is Jim Wallis, the founder and leader of a group of Christian Social Activists called the Sojourners. You may have heard of them. They’ve been around for more than forty years. The book was published in 2005, at the depths of the Bush Jr. regime. Somehow, by the time I was finished, I was both exhilarated and deeply depressed. One of my enduring complaints over the years has been the apparent silence of religious leaders as we have sunk into this Dark Age of the Soul. Wallis provided a whole lot of solid evidence that he and many, many other religious leaders from all different traditions have actually been very busy, meeting with Presidents and Prime Ministers, placing full-page ads in major newspapers, writing letters, having conferences, ever since the Civil Rights movement in the sixties. That was exciting. The depressing part is that all of this activity has been pretty much a waste of time and effort. Things just keep getting worse.

“To give a more specific answer to your question, I want to quote from Wallis’s book, a passage that he quoted from another book, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall. It’s kind of long, but it defines “nonviolent resistance” better than anything I ever seen. Here it is:

‘“The reality is that history-making nonviolent resistance is not usually taken as an act of moral display; it does not typically begin by putting flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions – strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage – in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor’s pillars of support. It is not about making a point, it’s about taking power.

‘“Regimes have been overthrown that had no compunction about brutalizing their opponents and denying them the right to speak their minds. How? By first demonstrating that opposition is possible, peeling away the regime’s residual public and outside support, quashing its legitimacy, driving up the costs of maintaining control, and over-extending its repressive apparatus. Strategic nonviolent action is not about being nice to our oppressor, much less having to rely on his niceness. It’s about dissolving the foundations of his power and forcing him out.”’

“Those last two sentences really hit home. Too bad Wallis and his well-intentioned allies have never absorbed them. Niceness is the fatal weakness of liberals. I’ll have a lot more to say about that as we go along, but, as I said earlier, our good nature is taken for weakness and stupidity. That should at least start to answer your question, Mary. What do you think?”

“You have taken my breath away. What did you say those two books were?”

“The first is God’s Politics, by Jim Wallis. That’s W-a-l-l-i-s. The quote is from page 161 of his book, taken from A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. Just so you know, anything I quote here will be referenced on my Web Site – The Sharpeyed Chicken Network. After every program, I’ll make sure it’s updated. Well, it’s time for another break. I’ll be right back.”

“Man, you’re not holding anything back, are you? You sure they can handle all this material? It’s commercial radio, you know. And a short attention-span is the norm these days.”

“Hey Ted, I’m not doing this for dummies. If there’s no audience for intelligent commentary and discussion, we’ll be gone soon enough, but I believe there are a lot of people out there who are starving for mental meat. And, these first few shows I’ll being laying the groundwork. Seems to me the most important thing we can do is distinguish ourselves from the rest of the garbage on the air, and I’ll say it right up front if you think it’s a good idea.”

“It would probably be a good idea. I’m with you about this, or I wouldn’t be working with you, but something this different on commercial radio, I don’t know.”

“You know as well as I do that we tried to sell this to Public Radio, but they’re too dependent on their upper-middle class donors. They’re unwilling to take any chances these days.”

“OK, OK, but I do think you need to be out front with this.”

“Hello, again, folks. My producer thinks I may be getting too deep too soon. After all, this is commercial radio, not NPR. But, for the record, my ideas are too radical for public radio these days. Ever since Gingrich and the Republicans threatened to withhold their funding, they’ve been running scared. And, what with corporate funders, and upper-middle class donors, they just ain’t what they used to be. Bending over backward to give equal time to both sides of every issue, even when one side is obviously wrong.

“I have to make it clear right up front that this program is going to be based on the assumption that there are plenty of intelligent, decent folks out there who want to hear a new message, and are very capable of following a complex discussion. If I’m wrong, we’ll be off the air soon enough, but you have to help me out by calling in with good questions and comments, to prove to the station and our advertisers that I’m right. We expect disagreement as well, and welcome it. As I said earlier, life would be pretty dull if we only hung out with those who agree with us. Do we have another call?”

“Hi. John here, from San Francisco. I like what I’ve heard so far, but do you really think you can make a difference? I have to admit, I share your frustration, but I can’t imagine that we can start a real movement from here. Like you said, the Bay Area is an island of sanity in a crazy world. Do you really think there are enough people in the rest of the country to get something started?”

“Great question, John. As a matter of fact, I do think we can make a real difference, especially if we can generate enough interest here to convince someone to syndicate this program to a wider audience. In case you didn’t know it, Rush Limbaugh started out on a tiny station in Roseville. Look how far he’s come.

“Beyond that, I really think there’s a lot more people out there around the country who can be convinced to join us, and I’ll tell you why, but first I have to go back more than thirty years. When Ronald Reagan set out to win the Presidency, he and his backers started talking about what he called the “Silent Majority.” Of course, the truth was that most of them were silent because they were at least a little ashamed of their racism, misogyny, and fear of the changes that had rocked the Sixties. Civil Rights, women’s rights, long-haired radicals, gasoline shortages, warnings by environmentalists and others that we would have to cut back on our consumption of scarce resources, it was a long, scary list. Reagan rode into office by promising that none of these changes were really necessary. He said it was “morning in America, the greatest country in the history of the world. Never mind all those doomsayers, he said, all we have to do is go back to the way we used to do things, and try a little harder. I’ll have a lot more to say about Reagan and his ilk as we go along, but for now I want to get back to the present. For several years now, I’ve been active in Community Organizing here in the city, specifically with the San Francisco Organizing Project, which is an affiliate of a national group of similar faith-based organizations, called PICO, which seems to stand for People Interested Community Organizing, I think. Nobody seems to know for sure, but there are more than fifty of these local groups, representing more than 15 million people. For the record, one of the reasons reactionaries are so critical of Community Organizing is that instead of charity, which tends to perpetuate poverty, we are trying to influence the political process in order to change the policies that serve to institutionalize poverty. Again, this subject will come up again and again as we go along.

A couple of years ago, I attended a national training in Pennsylvania, and one of our leaders explained that we were trying to create a structure of sorts, and like most structures, it has a front door and a back door. In the front door come people with needs, some quite desperate; in the back door, come folks with values, those who want to help change the conditions that make it so hard to meet those needs.

“Well, John, if you’re still with me, I believe that if you combined those with needs and those with the right values, you’d have a very large percentage of the American people. The problem is that no one is organizing them. I propose to call them the Decent Majority, where “decency” has nothing to do with personal, private behavior and everything to do with behavior that affects others. The polls keep telling us that a large majority in the U.S. Consider themselves “religious,” and, as far as I know, all legitimate religions insist that we are all responsible for the welfare of our fellow humans. Am I wrong, John?”

“I sure hope you’re not. You’ve got my attention. I just hope you can stay on the air and get that syndication you’re hoping for. Thanks for giving me some hope.”

“You’re very welcome, my friend. Doing this is part of my own therapy. It’s just too easy to get discouraged. Well, it looks like my first hour is just about up. Tomorrow I’ll get started on discussing some of the issues that I think are not getting enough exposure in the Mainstream Media. Just thought I’d throw in a little of that internet blog talk to show you all how hip I am. As promised, I’ll leave you with the question: How bad does it have to get?”

“Great job, Chappy! Good start, nice finish. Tomorrow we’ll get the music intro going. You said you want the Asleep at the Wheel version of “There ain’t nobody here but us chickens, right?”

“Right, Ted. And thanks for the encouragement. I thought it went pretty well, too, but I’m definitely prejudiced.”

Driving home, my mind was racing. What a great start! Or, was it? Sure, Ted liked it, and I got three perfect callers, but there was nothing really special about it. Nothing really controversial. And I’ll never get the syndication I want if I can’t do something really different, something no one else is doing, or has ever done. Now i’ve got a few hours to plan for my second show, and I’m already getting worried. That just won’t get it. I know I can do it, but now I have to prove it. To everyone.

OK, I think I’ve got it. Time to play the “financial card.” From stockbroker to poker dealer. I’m sure I can get a good hour out of it.

“There ain’t nobody here but us chickens…” “Hello again. That’s Asleep at the Wheel, and the Sharp-eyed Chicken Network is on the air. Today we’re going to talk about money. Everybody likes to talk about money, right? Well, I’ve never had much of my own, but I sure have processed a lot of it. I like to say that I’ve always been a kind of money conduit, in one end and out the other, and damned little of it sticking to me on the way through. My first dance with it was in the last half of the 1960’s, when I was a stockbroker in Hartford, Connecticut. When I started out, the Dow was at 1066, by the time I left in early 1970, it was 570. That’s right, 570! It was a very different world then, a very different country and a very different stock market. 10 million shares was a really big day on the New York Stock Exchange. The American Stock Exchange was a pale echo of its big brother, the NYSE. What we now call the NASDAC was then known as the “Over the Counter” Market, and that meant what it said, smaller, regional, newer companies had to earn their way on the formal exchanges. Their stock was kept by brokers as inventory and were literally sold over the counter. As for these so-called “derivatives” that brought us to the edge of the abyss, well, back then, all we had were “options” – Puts and Calls that were traded on the Chicago Mercantile exchange. One of the guys I trained with in New York was the son of a senior partner there. Now, these options were originally designed to provide price certainty for agricultural products, so that farmers and their customers could be sure in advance what the price would be when the product was ready for the market. It was a way of smoothing the unpredictable nature of the marketplace, where prices can fluctuate very wildly as a function of supply and demand. By the time I came on board, speculators were already buying these options based on where they thought the market was going – calls if you thought the price was going to be up when the option matured, puts if you thought it would be lower. Many if not most of these speculators had no intention of taking delivery of the actual product. I know this is probably boring to a lot of you, but it’s important to understand because it was the origin of the idea that it was ok to buy and sell packages of mortgages and even insurance policies on those packages, while having no intention of collecting on the actual mortgages. You can call it speculation, I would call it gambling, no less, no more.

“In those days, Brokerage houses were all partnerships, not corporations, and the partners were on the hook, 100% for the success and failure of their business. If they failed, their own houses, cars and other personal assets could be seized to settle the company’s debts. Being accepted as a partner was both a privilege and a big responsibility. Imagine how different the outcome would h ave been if the officers of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG had been personally responsible for their losses. Of course, you may have realized by now that, without the protection of incorporation, they never would have taken those risks. Call me naïve, if you will, but now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same rights as individuals, I believe that the individuals who make the corporate decisions should be held personally responsible for the consequences of their decisions. Of course, that would hold true as well for companies like Massey Coal, who murdered 29 miners by ignoring hundreds of safety violations. I’m sure you can think of many other examples. Corporations consider fines and other financial penalties as just another cost of doing business.

“To give you an idea of what the business was like back then, we were told not to call on Corporate officers and bankers because they didn’t make any money. The one exception was bankers who managed the investments for what we called “old money.” They didn’t really make much money, either, but they had influence over it. There were a couple of reasons those folks didn’t make much money: one was that they were trading long-term security for current income, and the other was that we still had a real progressive income tax, with a top regular rate of 70%, and up to 90% tax on what was called “excess income.” The Reagan/Thatcher Devolution destroyed that system, but that’s a subject for another program. We were expected to make our commissions on trades by entrepreneurs, who were more likely to take risks, and through family connections to that “old money,” which I didn’t have, but I had attended and graduated from an exclusive boarding school in Massachusetts, as a poor, scholarship boy and I guess they thought that the old boy network would make up for my lack of family money, It never did, and the customers I did sign up lost badly in the market drop I mentioned before. Along the way, my first marriage broke up, and my motivation left with it.

“In 1970, I was hired to come to San Francisco and set up a wholesale sporting goods territory. Most of it turned our to be guns, which I’ve never really liked all that much, and after a few months I was running a bowling alley and the pro shop, drilling balls and bowling in tournaments as a club professional. Early in 1972, I decided to move up in the world, and began working as a low ball poker dealer in a surreal joint in San Bruno known as Artichoke Joe’s. Nowadays it is a fancy casino, but when I started it was strictly old school. Sawdust on the floor, no women allowed, and a hard core, cutthroat , no limit, check and raise game of low ball draw poker, where, in theory, the worst hand wins. No pair, low cards, straights and flushes don;t count. The best hand is Ace, one, two, three, four, five, known as the Little Wheel. The main reason this game had become popular was that old-fashioned five-card draw poker had become too rational, too boring, not enough action.

“Why did this happen, you might ask? It may be hard to believe, but back in the Sixties, ordinary workers actually had discretionary income. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. By the early Seventies, the Vietnam War, despite the myth that we could afford “guns and butter, as Johnson claimed, and the formation of OPEC, which raised our cost of living in many more ways than just higher gas prices, had wiped out the discretionary income of most workers. Working in the gambling business, I was able to see the effect of this first-hand. To understand how, I need to take a couple of minutes to explain the philosophy of Poker. Don’t laugh. Every game that retains its popularity as long as poker, reflects some aspect of real life, or it would just be a fad, and disappear. Pure poker, which was either five-card draw or five-card stud, is a contest between chaos and order. The cards are shuffled, to maximize their random order, then dealt out, one at a time, to add to the randomization. The hierarchy that determines poker success is based on order: pairs, straights, flushed. The more orderly, the higher place in the hierarchy. The best hand is known as a Royal Flush, Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and Ten of a single suit.

“Clearly, the likelihood of higher levels of order ending up in one hand, is pretty remote. Previously, even in the poker games in those old Western movies, the action required at least some of the players to be able to take risks. The more risks taken, the better the action. The best players actually play very few hands, So, when discretionary income started drying up, nearly all the players had no choice but to minimize risk, which meant very little action. This not only made the game less interesting, but, since the House was taking 5% of the action, it meant a lot less income for the House. Time for a short break to pay the bills.”

“Well, Chappy, I think I can see where you’re going, but do you think maybe you’re stretching their attention span a little? Are you going to take calls?”

“I don’t know, Ted. Maybe yes, maybe no. I’m doing this pretty much off the top of my head, as you know, so I’m not sure when I’ll get to a natural opening, but I do think its important to do this, for a couple of reasons. The most important is to establish that I do know what I’m talking about in financial matters, and also because I’m going to connect this to what we’re dealing with today in the financial markets. If we don’t take calls today, maybe we can spend more time with them tomorrow, after I’ve set the stage. I really believe I have a viewpoint that is unique, and these first few shows will give me a chance to let them know who I am. If I just start shooting off my mouth, being contentious and controversial without this kind of background, I don’t think many folks will be willing to put up with it. If you are getting calls, just let them know that we’ll let them in tomorrow, ok?”

“Sure, buddy, I do believe in you and that you know what you’re doing, or I wouldn’t be along for the ride.”

“I’m back, and I hope you can see where this is going. I’m hardly the first person to say that they’ve turned our financial market into a casino, but I may be the only one who has actually worked in both worlds.

“Anyway, back to the action. Because until recently, taking a percentage of the action was the most important source of income in the financial community, and it still has a prominent role. So, old-fashioned five-card draw poker just wasn’t getting it done. In low ball poker, on the other hand, for the most part, disorder is rewarded. Except for straights and flushes, that is. The most important rule in low ball is no pairs. It should be obvious that this goal is a lot easier to achieve than pairs, trips and full houses. What actually happened in our no limit version was that someone who had a hand with no pair and no face cards would usually raise the pot on the first round, before the draw, and someone with three or usually four low cards would call the raise and draw, hoping to get a better hand, even one of those Little Wheels I was talking about. After the draw, the person with the “pat hand,” the one who had raised the pot, would have to decide whether or not the other guy had made his hand. In this game, the ability to “read” a bluff was more important than a knowledge of the odds. Most important, there was a lot more action, which made both players and the House very happy.

“Along the way, too many people figured out how to play this game, and the really good players, who were usually known as “hard rock miners,” because the only played when they either had a nearly unbeatable hand or when there opponent was someone they were confidant of being able to read, so nowadays, all you see on TV or on the Internet is a relatively new game, known as “Texas Hold-em” a type of stud poker where everyone has three cards in common, so that more “orderly” hands are likely, and therefore more action. For the record, the TV games are illusory, because they don’t show you all the hands where there is no action, and when all the players know what they are doing, that would be a large majority ot the dealt hands.

“Ok, you may be thinking, what’s the point? Well, there are some obvious differences between the gambling business and the stock market. When I said I decided to “move up in the world,” I wasn’t kidding. The stockbroker’s commission is supposed to be based on his or her specialized knowledge as to the likelihood of a positive outcome, despite the lame testimony of some of the senior partners of the major firms before Congress after the last meltdown, that they were only “making a market,” and assumed that their investors knew what they were doing. On the other hand, if you think the Poker dealer has any knowledge of the outcome, you should call the cops, which means, in my world, that the latter is a higher moral calling, because we now know that even if the broker really does have any insight into the future, he or she feels no need to tell you the truth.

“The most important difference, however, between those two worlds is that the gambling business takes no chances when it come to cheaters. Closed circuit TV’s, two-way mirrors, sharp-eyed floor men, in the casinos they even hire the best cheaters to work for the house, assuming that “it takes one to know one.” They are well aware that all that money attracts those who are determined to get an edge. One way or another. It brings out the worst in even the best people, you might say.

“In the financial markets, on the other hand, there is essentially no meaningful oversight. Regulations that were written during the Great Depression were wiped out by the Clinton Administration, under the supervision of the same people Obama hired to get us out of the mess, people like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. Back when I was a broker, the head of Bear, Stearns, a major firm that is now defunct, I might add, was a man named Alan “Ace” Greenburg, who famously noted that “people are a lot more honest when they know they’re being watched.” Duh! Even the SEC, which was supposed to be supervising the banks and brokers were asleep at the switch. Time for a break; I’ll be right back.

“Interesting, to be sure, Chappy, but have you got a destination for this? We are getting calls, mostly from people who are interested in the gambling stuff. I’m thinking maybe you want to take a couple of them. What do you think?”

“I think you’re right, Ted. First I want to tie the gambling stuff to our overall economy. I’ll tell you on the air when I’m ready to take the calls.”

“I’m back, folks, and my producer tells me that we do have some calls. I’ll be taking a couple in a few minutes; first, I want to tie this gambling stuff to our overall economy. At a very basic level, on the poker table, we would never have used real money – we used plastic chips. Of course, you paid real money to get the chips, and if you got any of them to the casher’s window, they would give you real money for them. But, in between, all the action was done with plastic. Sound familiar? Well, as someone who managed retail stores for the last 25 years of my working life, I got to live through the transition in our economy from cash and checks to credit and debit cards, and it was very interesting, I can tell you. When you pay for something with cash or a check, you have to know what you’re spending. Nowadays, I can tell you from first-hand experience, only a handful of those who use plastic ever even bother to ask what the total is. They just hand you the card, and, of course, a few do look at the little slip to see the total, but more and more all the time just scribble an illegible signature and stuff the slip in their pocket.

“We used to say that if there was real money on the poker table, the action would grind to a halt. The same is true for our economy. Without the plastic, consumer spending would never have been sustained as the income of ordinary workers has remained essentially stagnant when adjusted for inflation. Add in the amount of spending generated by refinancing homes during the real estate bubble with sub-prime mortgages, and spending would have been even lower. Given that around 80% of our economy is based on consumer spending, I’ll let you guess what would have been the result. And, with unemployment and under-employment at Depression era levels, as many as one quarter of homes either under water or delinquent on mortgage payments, and most folks following the advise of financial experts and their own commonsense by reducing their credit card balances, wow! It’s a wonder we have any economy at all. If it weren’t for our addiction to consumption and the Svengali-like effectiveness of advertising, we wouldn’t.

“One more thing to think about: remember when I was talking about how risk-taking is essential to the action and how the loss of discretionary income for ordinary workers in the early 70’s force us to change the game from a celebration of order to one of disorder? Am I the only one who can see the parallels today? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Texas Hold-em is all the rage on TV and on the internet? Indian casinos all over the country? I’ll finish this rap with an observation: when I left Connecticut in 1970, there was almost no legal gambling in the state. Greyhound racing, now long gone. Now they have huge casinos, multiple lottery games, off-track betting, who knows what else. When I got to California, there were a handful of Cardrooms like the one I worked at in San Bruno, leftover from gold-rush days. The only games allowed were draw poker and low ball, no stud, and an obscure rummy game called Panguini. I’ll tell you about that some other time, Hey! We have a call. Your name?”
“I’m Jim, calling from San Francisco. I’m fascinated by the idea that you were working as a poker dealer before it became so popular. I hadn’t even known that it was legal back then in California. Can you tell us more about what that was like?”
“Sure, Jim. I always enjoy talking about those early days. Of course, you know that poker has been around almost as long as there have been playing cards. Almost, though playing cards have been around for a very long time. I understand they kind of evolved from Tarot cards, which go back to the early Middle Ages. And, from the beginning there have been people, Gypsies and others, who told fortunes from regular playing cards and well as the Tarot. I’ve always felt there was something mystical and mysterious about them.

“Anyway, to get back to Artichoke Joe’s, the first thing to say is that, like all of the California Cardrooms, it was really a kind of social club, not at all like the casinos in Nevada and Atlantic City. Even then, in the early 70’s there were several thousand customers, a few hundred of whom were pretty regular, a few dozen of whom practically lived in the joint. In other words, most of them knew each other pretty well, whereas most of the casino customers were just strangers passing through. There were always several tables going, and the regulars liked to move around, from table to table, partly to change their luck, but mostly to take advantage of other players they thought they could beat. A certain amount of anonymity was expected – you have to remember that this was not considered a respectable activity then, and we had cops, firemen, businessmen, even a few prominent citizens as customers so most of them had nicknames, some of them right out of a Damon Runyan story. In order to move to another table, one had to have his name on a changeboard, actually a blackboard, and when a seat opened up, the names were called loudly by the floorman. You might hear “Coffee John” or Ice Cream Louie” or “Frisco Fred” called out. Initials were also popular.

“Of course, it was necessary to have rules, strict rules, because chaos was always lurking. It may seem strange, given the often motley crew, but cheaters were not common, because there were too many sets of knowledgeable eyes to get away with it, and there was nearly universal contempt for what we called “angle shooters” – those who tried to get an edge by finding ways to slide around the rules. We were playing “no limit,” with chips and one old trick would be to push a stack of chips into the pot, causing one or more players to throw in their hands, then pull the stack back as if you didn’t really mean it. So we had a circle in the middle of the table and the rule was that chips inside the circle had to stay in the circle. Sure enough, sooner or later a few tried holding the stack of chips in their hands, not touching the table, so we had to make another rule that the circle extended all the way up to the ceiling. I’m not kidding. We had one really sleazy guy, Ron, who was both a lawyer and a CPA in “real life,” which is probably not an accident, and he was so clever and persistent that we had regular meetings about him, and a whole set of rules that were named after him. Just one example: I was dealing to him one night and after the draw, with a lot of chips already in the pot, he took a card, cursed and tore his cards in half. His opponent, assuming the action was effectively over, put the rest of his chips in the pot, and looked at me, expecting that I would push the chips his way. Ron called his bet and turned over a Little Wheel, the best hand in Low Ball, albeit in several pieces. So we had to make a rule that you couldn’t win unless you had five unripped cards.

“Eventually, in front of a large crowd, the Artichoke, as we called the owner, called Ron out and loudly asked him why he kept coming back, night after night, to a place where everyone hated him so much. Ron, unfazed, looked Joe in the eye and said, “Joe, you of all people should understand why I’m here. I don’t come here to make friends, I come to make money, just like you.” I’m telling you this story because I want you to understand that unlike our everyday society, where lawyers make a handsome living by “shooting angles” or manipulating laws and juries, this kind of behavior was considered beneath contempt in our joint, where you often had no idea what these players were doing outside the joint. One of our most popular players, which is to say, a foolish risk-taker and generous tipper when he somehow won a pot, turned out to be a serial bank robber. Even after we found out where he was getting the money, he was a lot more popular than Ron, I can assure you.

“Wow, where does the time go? I’ll be back tomorrow, same time, same station, as they say. And remember, we are archiving the show on our web site, The Sharpeyed Chicken Network, so if you missed anything, you can hear it at leisure and think about questions you might have for tomorrow, I promise I’ll talk less then, and take more calls. As always, I’ll close with the question: ‘How bad does it have to get?’” (“Gallo del Cielo,” by Tom Russell, exit music.)

“Chappy, that was great, and we had a lot of calls who couldn’t get on. I think you really should spend tomorrow taking them. It will make them feel more like they’re part of the show, and it will let the station and our sponsors know that you are already building an audience.”

“Of course, Ted. I really meant what I just said. But I do think it’s been necessary to establish my credentials early on. Don’t you?”

“Absolutely, Chappy, but we have to keep a balance between talking and listening. You might want to think about questions you could ask them when they call. What do they think? That kind of thing. See you tomorrow.”

Driving home, I was feeling frustrated at my failure to get into more important and topical issues, but I was also clear that just coming in from left field with a lot of unpopular and strange ideas would never work. The conflict between getting their attention and getting at least a modicum of respect was something I had been wrestling with since I began planning to get on the radio. After all, no one knows who the hell I am, or why I might think they would be interested in my ideas. And people are much too interested in who you are than in what you’re saying. Shouldn’t be that way, but it is. So, tomorrow I’ll just have to depend on callers to set the context. No doubt about it; gambling is hot tight now. All that Texas Hold-em on TV and online. By next week, though, I want to get more into serious controversy.

“There ain’t nobody here…” Howdy, folks. The Sharp-eyed Chicken Network is back on the air again. Yesterday, we had a lot of calls that never got on the air, so today we’re going to open up the lines and let you in. If you have questions, or gambling experiences you want to share, the number is 1-800-CHICKEN, or 1-800-244-2536 for those of you who prefer the numbers. Yesterday, I was talking about what we called “angle-shooters” and I’m curious if you think bending the rules or finding ways to get around them is OK. I mean, if you were in court, accused of something, would you think it was OK for your lawyer to to whatever was necessary to get you off? You know, like finding a technical violation, or working the jury, either by confusing them or making an emotional appeal, even though you knew you were guilty? “Cause, for my money, angle-shooting is angle-shooting, and I don’t think it’s ever all right.

Another thing I was talking about is the way the House took a piece of the action, and, except for promising that the game was on the level and that the rules would be enforced, we had no responsibility to warn the suckers that they had no chance against the pros and the House. Do you really think Wall Street should be run like a gambling joint? When Blankenfein from Goldman, Sachs and the other executives from the financial industry were testifying in Congress after the collapse they all insisted that, unlike the business when I worked in it, they now believe they have no responsibility to those who buy their stuff to warn them that it might be a bad idea. To a man, they all insisted they were only “brokers,” providing a market for well-informed adults who should have known what they were getting. Do you think that’s the way it’s supposed to work. I’ll just add one more thing from yesterday’s discussion: the highest compliment you can pay a poker player is, “You’re the best damned liar I ever met!”

Ah, we have our first caller.