Investment Now Has Lost Its Luster Poem by gershon hepner

Investment now has lost its luster,
securities’ portfolios despised like porn,
capitulated all like Custer,
diminished, little like Big Horn.

“Thrift, Horatio, ” Hamlet said,
perhaps because the Prince was miffed
by value that his stocks had shed,
as well as Savings, Loan, and Thrift.

Far more rotten than the state
of Denmark once was in is that
we’re in: with zero interest rate
I say, “Aha! I smell a rat.”

Custer used to be a hero,
Denmark used to have a king,
but when values fall to zero
there’s no way to have a fling.

Flimflam fallacies fling out
since they’ve failed like General Custer,
Little Big Horned, in a rout,
while investment loses luster.

I’ve heard: “We have to spend and spend,
and tax and tax, elect, elect! ”
People whom I can’t defend
agree with this, but I object.

Inspired by an articles in the NYT Magazine, December 14,2008 by William Safire “Recovery”) :
Jolt, an acute form of “stimulus” — its etymology a mystery — is out of character for one who campaigned as “no-drama Obama.” His aides, on sober second thought, probably deemed it hardly a term to offer calm reassurance to Americans afflicted with investment disorder. Hence the incoming administration’s talking-pointed assumption of the soothing, traditional goal of recovery. What term could economic conservatives turn to for suitable derision? Unable to assail the sainted R-word defining the goal, one Republican countered with an equally traditional attack word defining the method of beginning the hoped-for crescendo: spending. “They have consistently said they are for more Washington spending, ” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Representative John Boehner, the House minority leader. “New rhetoric, same old Washington spending plan.” He undoubtedly knew that Democrats have long been sensitive to the word spending. That term, in politics, has gained a built-in sneer. As president, Bill Clinton made a point of using a synonym connoting wise expenditure rather than the profligate tossing-around of money. His chosen term, used repeatedly in Clintonian proposals for legislation mandating heavy outlays of funds, was investing — as in building schools and other sorely needed infrastructure that would pay off, as investments often do, in the future. (That’s before the word investing lost some of its luster.)
Democrats have been acutely sensitive to the “big spender” charge ever since a day at New York’s Empire City Race Track in August 1938. That was when Harry Hopkins, then F.D.R.’s closest aide, was reported by The Times’s Arthur Krock, among others, to have said to his friend Max Gordon, the theatrical producer, “We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.” Embarrassed when it appeared in print, Hopkins denied having uttered that political wisdom; Gordon, the source, could not deny he had heard it and passed it on, but simply shut up. The well-phrased aphorism became a favorite and famous Republican attack phrase. Forty years later, long after Hopkins needed protecting from embarrassment and just before Gordon’s death in 1978, I called the producer to verify the classic statement. As if reading from a card, Gordon snapped, “I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about the incident, thank you and goodbye” and slammed down the phone. To me, that steadfast refusal to recant was confirmation of its accuracy — and evidently it still stings.


12/14/08