GALLOWS POLE COVER

The ever-talented Jeroen ten Berge hits another one out of the park with his cover for my upcoming e-release GALLOWS POLE. It's a bit of a different look from my earlier e-books, but then, it's a somewhat different book than I've done before. Stay tuned....

Congressional OCD

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This past Tuesday, the United States economy was still fragile. A looming Greek debt crisis threatened to make things worse. Perhaps most tragically (judging from the wall-to-wall press coverage), someone named Kim Kardashian had just filed for divorce.

Beset by crises, it was hard to know which way to turn, which of our nation's many problems must be addressed first. But one man could see clearly what needed to be done. One man knew what required immediate action. That man was Speaker of the House John Boehner. With seconds ticking away, he and his fellow Republicans seized the moment and used it to its greatest advantage.

What step did these brave visionaries, these giants in the land, take? They boldly introduced legislation to have "In God We Trust" declared the motto of the United States.

This lightning stroke of legislative genius no doubt confused many people who thought that "In God We Trust" was already the national motto. Well, yes, it is. In fact, it's been declared the National Motto three times before: originally in 1956, then again in 2002, and once again in 2006.

The Supreme Court has upheld its use and insisted it's not an endorsement of religion. President Obama, much to the disgust of secularists, has also confirmed his support of using "In God We Trust" on our currency. The motto even hangs on the wall of the House chamber.

But apparently the Republicans in Congress have a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, like one of those people who have to keep going back and back and back again to confirm that the stove is off and the doors are locked, so that they end up being late for everything.

"If we don't vote again for 'In God We Trust,'" they must have been thinking, "something terrible could happen. I don't know what, but ... it'd be just terrible!"

Listen, for example, to the words of Rep. Trent Franks of the great (and apparently totally crazy) state of Arizona, who asserted that without affirming our faith in God yet again, "we should just let anarchy prevail because, after all, we are just worm food." Texas Rep. Lamar Smith agreed: "There are few things Congress could do that would be more important than passing this resolution."

That last statement recalled for me the rhetoric thrown about by the movement here in North Carolina for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, even though it's already explicitly illegal here.

One proponent of the amendment went on the radio and said, with what sounded like a straight face, that this was "the most important issue facing North Carolina right now." This, in a state in the throes of a massive budget crisis, still rebuilding from hurricane Irene's damage, with a 10.1 percent jobless rate.

Which led a good friend of mine to observe: "I woke up this morning to a fulfilling, full-time job, my wife's health costs are completely covered, the education system is so good that our dogs speak English and Spanish, the cat does calculus and we have a unicorn pooping Skittles in the front yard. So yes, let's go after gay marriage because everything else is 100 percent A-OK."

Anyway, the bill, to the surprise of absolutely no one, passed overwhelmingly, 396-9. And a new day dawned in America. Unfortunately, it looked just like the old day.

When the Republicans took control of the House, Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared, "Each day, we will hold ourselves accountable by asking the following questions: Are our efforts addressing job creation and the economy; are they cutting spending; and are they shrinking the size of the federal government while protecting and expanding individual liberty? If not, why are we doing it?"

Why, indeed. Maybe it's because the only "jobs bills" the Republicans can come up with are just tax cuts and more tax cuts - "solutions" which have been proven to have no effect on the jobless rate. We've had 10 years of tax cuts now, thanks to Dubbya Bush, and the economy's still struggling.

So in order to distract us from the fact that the Republican solution is to do more of the same and hope for a different result - the very definition of insanity - they spend time on easy-to-pass legislation that's already passed repeatedly. It makes them feel all righteous and panders to the religious right, but it does exactly nothing to help America.

DEAD OF WINTER: Homicide For The Holidays

Recently I've joined a cadre of several of my favorite authors under the name of the Thalia Press Author's Co-Op. We're helping each other get our backlists up as e-books, and promoting new, independently published material as well. We've got a group project coming up called DEAD OF WINTER, featuring new, winter themed short stories by Chaz McGee (aka Katy Munger), Gary Phillips, Sarah Shaber, and others.

My own contribution, "I'll Be Home For Christmas," features Gibson County Chief Deputy Tim Buckthorn, who was one of my favorite characters in my critically acclaimed novel BREAKING COVER. My friend David Terrenoire observed once that the book was as much Buckthorn's story as it was Tony Wolf's, and he was right. I've been wanting to use Tim in a story for a while, and this was my chance.

The book's tentatively set for release on November 15th...I'll keep you posted.

The Zombie Renaissance

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Tomorrow is Halloween, the time when we think about ghosties, ghoulies, and various things that go bump in the night. So it seems an appropriate time to discuss the Zombie Renaissance.

Seems like there’s never been a better time to be a creator of zombie-related art and entertainment. The website 24/7 Wall Street estimates that “today’s zombie-genre economy,” as they put it, is worth up to $5 billion.

First and foremost, of course, there are the movies. Starting with the shambling, rotting grandaddy of them all, “Night of the Living Dead,” all the way though films like “28 Days Later,” its sequel “28 Weeks Later,” the seemingly unkillable “Resident Evil” franchise, the Will Smith vehicle “I Am Legend” (which substituted fast-moving, rage-filled zombies for the vampires in the original novel), the hilarious spoofs “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland,” and the upcoming “World War Z,” starring Brad Pitt, it seems that the undead make for great box office.

Then there are things like video games (the recent smash hit shoot-em up “Call of Duty: Black Ops” comes with a mode where the player battles Nazi zombies); TV shows (AMC’s “The Walking Dead” has just been picked up for a third season); comic books; and even novels such as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” which takes Jane Austen’s classic novel and updates it with a few ghouls (as an Austen-loving friend of mine puts it, that’s just so wrong).

Some people jump on the zombie bandwagon through so-called “zombie walks,” in which crowds of people make themselves up as zombies and lurch, moan and chomp their way through cities and towns, all in good fun and sometimes for charity.

The first recorded walk occurred in 2001 in Sacramento to promote a horror film festival, but the idea quickly spread like — well, like a zombie plague. Now cities compete for the record of biggest walk, with the current crown held by Asbury Park, N.J., which recorded an invasion of 5,000 rotters and secured a place for itself in “The Guinness Book of World Records.”

Dublin, Ireland, claimed a turnout of 8,000 for the one they held July 23 of this year, but Guinness has not yet confirmed the number, possibly because of the difficulty of sorting out whether a pale person staggering through the streets of Dublin and muttering incoherently is a wannabe zombie or just a drunk on his way home from the pub.

Which raises the question: Why are the walking dead such a hot item these days? I mean, I love a good zombie story as much as the next guy, but even I have trouble explaining why zombies seem to be replacing vampires as everyone’s favorite undead.

I can almost see the appeal of the vampire thing. There’s a certain sexiness about vampires, or so the fans tell me. They’re beautiful, their hunger equates with great passion, they bite your neck — hey, it’s not my kink, but whatever floats your boat. But it’s hard to envision a best-selling book and movie series about a forbidden romance between a beautiful but awkward teenage girl and a mindless, flesh-eating ghoul.

Maybe it’s because zombies embody something we all recognize deep down, something that’s definitely on the rise these days. As my friend Stephen Blackmoore, author of the upcoming zombie novel “City of the Lost,” once put it: “Zombies aren’t terror, they’re dread. They’re the physical embodiment of anxiety.” Which may be why they’ve gotten so much more popular in these anxious times.

On the flipside, though, zombies are kind of goofy, with their blank expressions, their clumsy shuffle, the bits falling off. They’re funny in a sick kind of way. They take that anxiety and make it into something you can laugh at. If you can laugh at it, it’s not so scary.

And that’s what Halloween is all about, Charlie Brown.

(click the pic for hints on surviving a zombie plague. Because you just never know.)

Graveyard Tales

 
New for Kindle and Nook: "The Caretaker." Two short stories from the graveyard, just in time for Hallowe'en!

In "The Caretaker," William Cain doesn't know why only he can see the new arrivals in his cemetery, or why they tell him their stories--but he knows how to take care of their unfinished business. "Spadework" is a previously published tale of a father's revenge.

Cover by David Terrenoire.

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005ZT6PPU

Nook:  http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/e/2940013246478

We'd Get Jail Time If We Tried This

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OK, listen up and I’ll tell you what happened.

Citibank is the giant consumer-banking arm of an amazingly, colossally gargantuan financial company called Citigroup.

And they don’t just make their money by charging you confusing and ridiculous fees for using your own money and by issuing credit cards with interest rates that would shame a Mafia loan shark; they also offer “investment services.” Among the investments they peddle are what are called CDOs, which is short for “Collateralized Debt Obligations.” Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

Simply put, a CDO is a big ol’ bundle of debts. If you buy a CDO, you get paid when the debts do. If a whole bunch of the debts go into default and never get paid, neither do you.

So what Citibank did is offer a whole bunch of these CDOs to investors, telling those investors that the packages had been put together by an impressive-sounding outfit called “Credit Suisse Alternative Capital.”

How could this possibly go wrong? The people picking the investments in the bundle certainly sounded impressive; they had “Swiss” right in the name, and we all know how good the Swiss are with money, right?

Well, no. The CDOs, as it turns out, were backed by those infamous “subprime” mortgages. They were, in fact, crap. When mortgages started defaulting all over, the CDOs they were backing collapsed. Investors lost millions. Citibank, along with several other financial institutions, had to be bailed out by the U.S. government.

They did eventually pay their government loans back in full. So all’s well that ends well, right? Too bad about the people who bought all those bad CDOs, but who could have known they’d be duds?

Well, as it turns out, Citibank knew.

According to documents filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, it wasn’t Credit Suisse that had had the major hand in picking the lousy investments that backed the CDOs; it was Citibank itself. And they knew the investments they were peddling weren’t as solid as they made them out to be.

In fact, they were so dubious about the products they were selling that they took what are called “short positions” on them in other financial markets. In essence, they bet on their own investments to fail. And when they did, Citibank got paid anyway. In the immortal words of Jerry Reed, Citibank got the gold mine while its customers got the shaft.

Now, imagine if you will that I’d sold you some impressive-looking papers that I swore were bonds that were going to make you wealthy. I even brought out a bearded guy with a tweed coat and a pipe who told you he was a famous economist and that he’d pronounced the investments sound.

But the so-called “bonds” were actually just something I’d printed up on my computer, backed up by a lot of junk from my storage shed. The “economist” was some old dude I’d paid to say any nonsense I told him to. 

Meanwhile, I’d gone and placed a bet that I could bankrupt you.

For you and me, that sort of con game would be a felony. No one from Citibank, however, is going to jail. The company, without admitting any wrongdoing whatsoever, agreed to pay a fine of $285 million. This seems like a lot of money, until you consider that Citibank reported, according to its own website, net income of $3.8 billion [with a “b”] in the third quarter of 2011 alone.

And that, my friends, is one very big reason why people are in the streets, not only on Wall Street and in Times Square, but across the world. They’re sick of the fact that no one, whoever’s in power, seems to be willing to hold these mega-banks to the same standards as you or me when they rip people off.

And yes, I include the Obama administration in that. While they’ve made some attempts at financial reform, they haven’t been nearly as vigorous about it as I’d like. Of course, “as vigorous as I’d like” would include public floggings and the placing of bank executives into the stocks to be pelted with offal, so I don’t think I’ll ever be completely happy with anyone.

But the point is this: If reading about Citibank’s shenanigans and the resultant slap on the wrist ticks you off, then you may have more in common with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement than you think.