minneapolis upside down

Oh shit, I should have known that one of my characters would slap me upside the 'ead and make me post again.

Chris Stewart, Rahelio, whatever.

Thanks, Chris for being such a crazy asshole. Were you buzzing?

And letting those racist motherfuckers over at Anti-Strib get their hooks in.

Thanks Chris. You goddamn dipshit.

You are our Sarah Palin. Thanks again, for using your power to fuck over someone with less. It proves your manhood, I suppose.

You win, until the election.

See below.

--Loosetrife

and surviving change.



--Loosestrife

Awhile back, early in the emerging Petters scandal, I wrote a bit about the mysterious case of Frank Vennes Jr., "facilitator" of the Tom Petters' ponzi scheme.

Yesterday, the Strib let fly with a story about Vennes' knowledge of the Petters' ponzi scheme some 9 months before the feds shut the whole thing down.

This is hardly news. An experienced grifter, religious conversion notwithstanding, Vennes had to know in this godly heart that something was not quite right: it's the too good to be true principle. What did he care? Petters compensated him mightily, providing most of Vennes' income, $28 million, according to the Strib.

If Vennes learned of Petter's fraud scheme just 9 months before the feds raided Vennes' home as stated in the Strib article, then the big question is now whether faith-based Frankie continued to serve as a facilitator steering investors towards Petters. The article already states that Vennes did not alert anyone but his own attorney, christ-like Craig Howse, when alledgely learning that he was waist-deep in a fraud scheme worth possibly $3.5 billion. (That figure keeps growing by the way. Will it reach $5 billion?)

Which means that Vennes was sitting on the board of Minnesota Teen Challenge with knowledge that that the organization had millions invested in a ponzi scheme; Vennes possibly was responsibile for Teen Challenge making that investment.

This brings us to interesting questions. Was he using faith-based organizations and the Christian community as easy marks? Was Vennes, whose previous crime career involved money-laundering, using the Christian non-profit world and unsuspecting preachers as the ultimate money laundering scheme? Did others in the faith-based world have knowledge of fraud that Petters and Vennes were perpetrating but were content to skim big money off it?

After all, as Rick Warren says, "With God’s authorization, the outcome is guaranteed to be successful." The possibilities are endless with that creed.

I doubt that Vennes was in the dark about the Petters operation at any point although being an experienced flim-flam man, he knew when to keep his mouth shut, even to Petters.

The feds will be searching Vennes' email account and that of this son, Denley. According to the Strib, Vennes sent documents to investors through those two accounts. Apparently that search warrant is sealed at this point. It's twenty-four pages? I'd sure like to see it.

Correction: The warrant is not 24 pages. The affidavit is, I think.

--Loosestrife

Being a commie, I was listening the AM 950 as I motored from my safe South Minneapolis home to the suburban hinterlands yesterday evening. As I arrived at my destination, Mark Heaney had a guest from Minnesota 2020 who was discussing the shift from taxes to "fees" in Minnesota under the Pawlenty thumb.

I walk into the office, and I could hear the unmistakable rhythm of right wing outrage. It was kind of like Muzak: I could just make out the tune but not any of the words. I had a wait, so I moved closer to the speaker.

I couldn't tell what it was--I don't listen enough to radio yahoos to identify them readily. It seemed to be local, however.

The speaker's rant was that this country has sunk to the point where it is "acceptable" to vote for someone who redistributed wealth, takes "your money" and gives it someone else. Voting this way constitutes theft, is un-American, and is immoral according to this yahoo. There were, of course, platitudes about the "free market" and laments about Al Franken's victory over Norm Coleman.

I stepped away when a seat opened up in the waiting room, but I sit too much of my day, and I got back up to pace around.

Now, they were taking calls.

The attack on the loser Norm Coleman was immediate. He was to blame for his loss to Franken because he attacked conservatives, one call claimed. I waited for someone to say Coleman couldn't be trusted since was a Jew. I knew there was at least one caller in the queue who was thinking it.

I drifted out of range. When I got back within earshot, the host was saying that Coleman lost because he was too far left, finally exclaiming that he was afraid that the Republicans wouldn't learn the lesson that you can't beat the Democrats by trying to be like them.

It was a small, good thing.

My drive back was delightful. The suburban neon played nicely through the frosty windows. I don't remember what was on Air America.

--Loosestrife

"The Holy Hustle" seems an apt name going forward for will be an on-going examination of the myriad variations on that most American of scams, religion. Of course, the focus will be on local manifestations, but this week I take a little side trip since Barack Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration has become such a flash point.

Stylistically and theologically, Rick Warren's antecedent is Billy Graham, a life-long Democrat and anti-segregationist, whose "crusades" in stadiums across America preached a message that was not too overtly political while the Graham himself was a major political figure and a virulent anti-communist demagogue. It was easy to sit through a Graham crusade and not remember much about it, bland and wholesome as it was, but behind the scenes at the White House home of his good friend, Richard Nixon, Graham engaged in mildy anti-Semitic banter with his buddy. Later in his his life, Graham speculated that AIDS was God's punishment on those who it afflicted.

Graham later apologized for those remarks; he always had his finger in the wind and often softened his red-necked fundamentalist views when they threatened his huge popularity or influence. Rick Warren has that tendency sometimes, too, like when he removed the most offensive of the gay bashing language from his website recently.

On the other hand, Billy Graham's son, Franklin, couldn't be better cast as the fallen son who repents so as to take over the family enterprise and fails to be up to the task. It's clear that Franklin just doesn't have the stuff continue his father's "Pastor to the President" shtick going, despite being the chosen one at W's 2001 inauguration. Tellingly, his sister says of Franklin in a 2006 USA Today article, "He didn't get Daddy's gift of diplomacy."

The job of Pastor to the President is open, in other words, and Rick Warren is available, very available.

Like Billy Graham, he is a Southern Baptist. Like Billy Graham, he has successfully and consciously inserted himself into political world without an overt political play.

Further, Warren provides potent and convenient symbolism for Barack Obama--Warren is a balding beefy unattractive white man, with a bad goatee and tent-like bold print shirts, who harbors all sorts of phobias and bigotry but who is basically good, trying be open minded and understanding in this crazy world in which we all live. Men who look like Warren are among the voters that Obama didn't quite reach in 2008, and having Pastor Rick on the podium on the inauguration may well be the opening shot of the 2012 election. If Warren has a few problems with the gays, then so be it. Politics is politics.

And Rick Warren's thinly veiled revulsion at all things non-heterosexual has gotten the attention, but Warren has a lot of other, shall we say, interesting views, many of them, no doubt, divinely inspired.

Click on his website and one is greeted by a manifesto claiming an imperial agenda for the "The Church," wherein it's organizational superiority to both business and government makes it "the greatest force on earth."

It's an inherently political document, wherein he claims the inevitable victory of a mass "Church" movement over the godless, and therefore bankrupt (in every sense of the word), secular institutions that are failing us.

"With God’s authorization, the outcome is guaranteed to be successful," claims Warren, placing himself firmly in the tradition of godly hucksters and the hard Dominionist camp of Pastors who seek a neo-tribal society with clergy exerting ultimate authority over the lives of their followers, a model not unlike that of the most conservative elements of the Catholic church or Islam. Whether in a stiff white collar, a bow tie, a thobe, or a Hawaiian shirt, these boys all seek a world where their--that is God's-- authority is unquestioned and women (and children) know their place

*********************

Warren's homophobia is odious but typical of his flock. I am far more disturbed that Obama would choose Warren as the most prominent religious figure at the inauguration when the Pastor Rick is praying to replace the federal government with "The Church."

In that, politically speaking, he represents a continuation of the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell version of politico-evangelical clap trap, casually dressed and marginally more charitable in his stances on HIV/AIDS and global warming, rather than Billy Graham's less ideological tradition. Where Robertson and Falwell openly desired to influence and infiltrate government and did, now with disastrous results, Warren apparently seeks to establish Religion as a rival to government--as Apple to government's PC.

Warren is not alone, of course. Locally, the Petters' scandal (and bloggers like myself) have led to a discussion of Minnesota Teen Challenge that illuminates the arrogance, delusion, and deceit possible within faith based initiatives. The contradictions inherent within the the anti-secular rhetoric of hard shell religious organizations when taking government money are easily resolved by the missionary zeal. As long as the church is the top, it's all good for religiously inspired poverty johns.

One of Obama's worst tendencies is to support the faith-based bullshit institutionalized under the Bush regime, and it will take a mighty effort to cut religious hucksters off the government teat.

Another bad Obama tendency is to subscribe to Rahm Emanuel nasty insider political tactics, making moves that throw off your demanding allies as well as your enemies, keeping everyone off balance for political advantage.

A third is the insufferable "team of rivals" Lincoln worship that is absolutely useless in modern politics, except as a strategy to get elected or as a way to fill time and space for unimaginative pundits.

Put these three bad tendencies together and you get Rick Warren at the inauguration and an early lesson in how the Obama team works. Don't get me wrong, there are some very good things happening in the transition, but it will be important to maintain a perspective only possible through distance when dealing with the new administration.

Even Rick Warren may need to keep that in mind.

--Loosestrife

Life will allow me to blog a bit more now, so I'll be picking up some of the poorly developed themes scattered in my intermittent postings of the past few months.

First, let me gloat just for a moment on the awesomeness of my polling methodology, which appears to have accurately called the outcome of the Minnesota senate race on election night before the polls actually closed.

Adios Normy.

--Loosestrife

An unconfirmed report is circulating that the 133 mysterious missing ballots in Minneapolis crucial to the outcome of the Franken/Coleman Senate race have been found.

An source close to the investigation of besieged auto magnate Denny Hecker's mysterious auto accident on County Road 6 in Plymouth last night revealed that the missing ballots were discovered in an empty potato chip bag in the trunk of Hecker's car .

Also discovered in trunk was a paper shredder and receipt for its purchase from Petters Warehouse Mall of America store last October.

The source disclosed the Hecker's injuries resulted in part from a box of faux leather Bibles that that struck Hecker in the back of the head as his vehicle tumbled down an embankment.

There was no indication whether the Bibles were also purchased at Petters Warehouse.

--Loosestrife