If Jesus Was At The Pope’s White House Dinner, Did He like The Food And Wine?

George and Laura Bush threw a big bash for Pope Benedict XVI at the White House on April 17, celebrating his birthday and his first trip to the United States as pope. The pope did not attend the party for 250 invited guests. He was busy at a prayer service for U.S. bishops. I thought this was a bit strange, even if his bishops probably need prayer more than anyone else in the country.

Among the delicacies on the menu, according to the Associated Press, were morel-encrusted scallops, spatzle, angel hair asparagus bisque, veal, white truffle-potato dumplings, carrots and mushrooms, lettuces and candied pumpkin seeds, squash carpaccio, pumpkin oil vinaigrette, raspberry crisp and mint coulis. I’m just a country boy raised on 180 acres of rocks and sand by Little Falls so I had to go to sources to see what the guests were actually eating. This ain’t McDonald’s stuff—or my grandmother’s either.

All of these things were swilled down with Peter Michael Les Pavots wine that “frugal” White House Food and Beverage Manager Daniel Shanks described as suitable for formal affairs at a “frugal” $135 a bottle (I used the word “frugal” twice because that is how Shanks describes himself.). When Corky and I are flush we turn into oenophiles by buying five liters of wine at about $10 a box. So I guess if we bought Peter Michael Les Pavots wine by the box, it would cost us about $400. Well, nothing is too good to serve at the White House.

After reading about the dinner celebrating the birthday of one of the major religious figures in the world, I had the sacrilegious thought of what Jesus would have thought of the menu and the wine if He had attended the dinner. I guess the wine would have been cheaper if He had had anything to do with it, particularly if He had walked down 16th St. in Washington through the poor sections of D.C. Maybe some theologian will choose to answer my question: Does anyone know what was on the menu at the Last Supper?

I Wonder if the Excess Food Was Offered to the Hungry and Homeless at the White House Gate

While the five Roman Catholic members of the Supreme Court who were invited by Lurch and our leading politicians and Bush campaign contributors feasted on white truffle-potato dumplings and angel hair asparagus bisque, I wonder if their thoughts ever slipped to the subprime mortgage capital of the world, Cleveland, Ohio, and the people who were being evicted.

One out of every ten homes in Cleveland is now vacant. The homes are no longer livable because thieves have stripped them of all copper piping and steel and aluminum siding. Copper has become a precious metal in the ghettos at $3.50 a pound. Entire sections of the city look like New Orleans’ Ninth Ward two years after Katrina.

It’s ironic that many of the nation’s homeless now have homes to live in because they are squatting in foreclosed homes. Over 15,000 single-family homes are vacant in Cleveland. On any given night there used to be 4,000 homeless. Not anymore.

In a small starter-home development called Windy Ridge outside of Charlotte, North Carolina 132 homes were built. In just one year 81 homes have gone through foreclosure. They all have been stripped of any salable metals, and have been taken over by drug users and the homeless. Doors and windows have been broken by vandals.

In Elk Grove, California, a suburb of Sacramento, over 10,000 homes in the $500,000 range were built in the last five years (Of course, $500,000 in the California real estate market doesn’t buy much.) Now many have been foreclosed on while others have been rented by banks and mortgage companies. Street gangs from Sacramento have vandalized and stripped many of the houses. Broken doors and windows and brown lawns mark the victims.

What Do Hedge Funds Manufacture Anyway?

Do hedge funds grow little bushes in a row and sell them by the yard? I don’t know, but whatever hedge funds process, manufacture, or grow must be very attractive to the public at large because hedge fund managers are now the best paid people in the United States. They make even more money than healthcare CEOs, insurance company CEOs, or Wall Street investment bankers.
As I understand it, hedge funds make money on transactions and betting on losers and winners. They don’t seem to make anything you can eat or anything one can use to make something that will provide some service.

So what are they good for? Well, they provide the really rich with recreation. Hedge funds are a big step above Las Vegas casinos. Billions are bet by the filthy rich on what businesses may succeed or fail. After seven years of Bushonomics the rich have become richer so they have a huge amount of surplus money to play with while the middle-class has had stagnant wages for seven years and financial predators forcing them into home foreclosures.

While the median American family earned $60,500 last year, a hedge fund manager who wanted to make the top 25 had to earn a minimum of $360 million. What does one do with a million bucks a day?

But that’s just peacock feed compared to the real winners. The top hedge fund manager last year was John Paulson of Paulson & Company who pulled in a cool $3.7 billion. Two other hedge fund managers, James H. Simon and George Soros, each made $3 billion. Just these three could buy 71,851,851 bottles of house wine for the White House. The New York Times reported that the top 50 hedge fund managers earned $29 billion last year. Just the 50 could pay for two months of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Mr. Paulson made his money by betting against complex mortgage and financial “products.” He won top prize because money is the ultimate measure of success on Wall Street. Have you heard of collateralized debt obligations? Well, whatever they are, he bet they would decline in value. Actually, they tanked. But what good did he do for society? To me a good kindergarten or music teacher is more valuable

A Number “1” License Plate For $14,000,000

So the top collector of money is classified a winner in today’s winner-take-all society. In the United Arab Emirates, license-plate numbers are sold to the highest bidder. In 2008, a businessman bid and paid $14 million for the number “1”. In a way, it reminds me of that great Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?”

The wealthy on Lake Minnetonka in Minneapolis are currently having a big contest on who will have the largest boat on the lake. Thirty-two footers are becoming quite common, with some boats too big to dock in front of the “cottage” because the water is only 18 inches deep.

It looks like laissez-faire, let-the-buyer-puke capitalism is rampant again for the second time in the last hundred years. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is larger now than it was in 1929 just before the Great Crash and the Great Depression. One indicator: one trip to a pig or sheep farm by a vet to treat one mature animal is now more costly than what either animal is worth.

Getting Rich Peddling Junk

A New York Times editorial put it succinctly: “What we’re witnessing is a disastrous collision of greed and ignorance at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street. Some banking kingpins got rich peddling junk. In a just world, they’d be sentenced to building Habitat homes for eternity.”

But what are these rich kingpins doing? In their best free-market whining voices they are holding their tin cups in supplication to their buddies on the Federal Reserve Board and tearfully pleading, “Please, Sir, may I have some more?” in the best tradition of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. It’s disgusting. These people have stolen billions of dollars from the middle class over the last decade and they still don’t have enough. While we are saving the billionaires and millionaires associated with Bear Stearns and other Wall Street thieves from going to prison for fraud, over ten percent of American homeowners now have homes valued less than their mortgages—and they don’t even own a tin cup.

Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group does not have to worry about his mortgage. When that hedge fund went public, he made $677.2 million when the stock was offered and he retained stock valued at $8 billion. Schwarzman has a $35 million apartment on Park Avenue, the former E.F. Hutton $20.5 million estate in Florida, a $34 million Federal-style estate in the Hamptons, and a vacation home on Saint-Tropez. He has his own jet to race from one house to the other. To top it off, he “rents” the plane to his business for a paltry $1.54 million a year. No, that doesn’t top it. For his birthday he employed composer Martin Hamlisch of Broadway fame to play the piano for some undisclosed fee—and paid Rod Stewart a million bucks to sing “Happy Birthday.” Now, that is real class. I wonder if Jesus was also at the birthday party acting as his sommelier.