E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

It must really be fun being a bankster. You get free everything: basically: free holidays, free health care, free lunch, tax free, freedom to do whatever you want or go where you want at somebody else's expense, and best of all, free money. You even get free access to Congress, the White House, and Wall Street. Pretty good deal, all in all. But what do banksters do for fun, when not watching their private sports teams, America's Cup yachts from their private helicopters or aircraft carriers? Well, now I know, from personal experience, and my suspicion is that anyone who reads this blog will recognize their own place on this game board as well: it's called 'pawn.' But the game isn't chess, because that would be pretty much equal between two players, and if there's anything banksters hate it's fair play, or equality in terms of, well, terms. What banksters love above all else is to toy with people's hopes, dreams, expectations, and, well, nest ...

I was raised in a Quaker family, and grew up protesting nuclear weapons in Times Square back in the Fifties (remember 'Ban the Bomb'? That was me, a naive six year old, holding one of those signs). When I graduated from Syracuse University in 1968, the war in Vietnam was raging, and so was my generation. We truly believed we could change the world, bring peace and prosperity and justice to all, and—well, you know how all that turned out. Two decades later, after working so hard to change the world with so little success, I finally concluded that presenting the “truth” as I saw it didn't always work, if ever. Sometimes, I was beginning to realize, good storytelling may be a better way to reach people than on-the-nose reality. Or even gently presented reality laced with humor, the way the late great Art Buchwald mastered this skill with his political satires. Having taken my best shot at doing good without much success, I decided to try my hand at doing well, or at least mak...