|
August 7, 2002
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
August
7, 2002
Rigas
in Cuffs
by Dr. Susan Block
Brothers and Sisters, Lovers and Sinners, Masturbators
and Stockholders, Fornicators and Thieves In these dark days
of creeping loss of liberty and drooping market value, the Lord
and the Lady have granted us a Miracle! Hallelujah (Amen and
Awomen)! They have brought the Great Censor down to his knees.
They have cuffed his wrists, arrested his ass, and taken it and
the Fruit of his Loins, those rotten, greedy sons of his, down
to the courthouse, and kept them there until they posted bail
of $30 million looted from their stockholders. Yes, indeed. Beware
of those who are holier than thou, for often they are fleecers
of the own flock (and stock!). Now they will pay for their sins.
Rigas in Cuffs. It has a ring to it.
Like Venus in Furs. And why not? He had me gagged. So why shouldn't
he handcuffed, shackled, harnessed, humiliated, helpless, disabled,
unable to meddle with my show anymore? John J. Rigas can't meddle
with anybody's shows anymore. Praise the Lord & the Lady!
Praise be to the Power and Glory of Truth!
But, all preaching aside, Brothers and
Sisters, I'm having a little trouble with gloating. Probably
not as much trouble as most people. I was as thrilled as any
media whore to be courted for two whole days by the Wall Street
Journal. Actually, I was more of a media slut, since I didn't
get paid for it. Though I'm still getting calls from investors.
Block stock going up! As Adelphia plummets to hellish levels.
We're not talking just genteel delisting here. We're talking
steel handcuffs that slice the tender, naked flesh of your pampered
78-year-old wrists.
My first time in The Journal !
Maybe now they'll take my ads for telephone sex therapy.
I was practically having phone sex with
Jimmy Breslin. He called just after Sally Beatty from The
Journal told me not to tell anyone that The Journal
was writing about how a broken, busted Rigas puts my show and
other sex-oriented programming back on Adelphia Cable TV. At
one point, I had Jimmy on the headset and Sally on the handheld.
It was almost a ménage à trois. Jimmy was chortling
with Pulitzer-Prize-winning glee over the idea of that old hypocrite
John J. Rigas, having censored TV shows on bondage, now in handcuffs
himself; while Sally, on the other line, was checking her figures.
It all comes down to figures. The naked figures on my show that
the Rigases covered up, and the figures on their balance sheets
that they also covered up, figures that hovered around $2.7 billion
(and that's not counting the golf course).
Now New Times LA has chimed in,
giving me the "Last Laugh" on my Rigas Nemeses. Ha
ha, hee heeee! I'm on laughing gas! Did you know if you type
"John J. Rigas Adelphia" into Yahoo, my website comes
up FIRST out of over 1000 entries? A bit of an albatross around
Johnnie's neck on the good ship Adelphia, aren't I?
Oh, the Markets rallied as the Rigas
Boys were carried away, awaaay! Everyone loves to see a hypocrite
exposed or a crook captured, and this story has both. Charged
with conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud and securities fraud,
convictions could send each of the Rigases to prison for up to
30 years and cost them millions of (stolen) dollars in fines.
In a 68-page criminal complaint, Postal Inspector Thomas F.X.
Feeney said that John Rigas, ''together with members of his family,
has looted Adelphia on a massive scale, using the company as
the Rigas family's personal piggy bank.'' Now I know it's not
exactly original, but I used the "piggy" metaphor 2
months ago on "Adelphiagate," along with my Miss Piggy
Doll (chained up like John), now a public access television classic.
I'm not complaining. It's just a little strange to hear Federal
agents of the Bush Administration using the same expressions
I've used about one of my personal adversaries.
Well, if you ask me, anyone so intent
upon covering up people's bottoms is probably covering up the
bottom line.
And these days, everyone is asking me,
congratulating me like I won a wrestling match. It's great. But
it's also a little weird to thrive on another's misfortune. Especially
when I know whose purposes the internationally televised, arresting
image of "Rigas in Cuffs" serves even more than mine.
My fellow Yalie in the White House is so transparently
using John Rigas as an old-fashioned scapegoat that it's almost
embarrassing.
It's easy to see why. Rigas is not a
member of the Club. You know, that extension of Skull and Bones,
the Club that keeps Bush Buddies Dick Cheney and Kenneth Lay
from getting carted off in cuffs for their crimes as the heads
of Halliburton and Enron. Rigas is a freak. (and that's just
one reason I don't want him dictating what we can watch on TV!)
. He was also the worst at covering his tracks. And obviously,
he didn't contribute quite enough of his stockholders' money
to Republican coffers to earn him any respect. So, now the Great
Pretzel Swallower is using the Little Censor-in-Thief as an example
to take the heat off the Veep and Kenny-Boy.
So, here he is, my ancient adversary,
at the center of what is, in his own words, "a Greek tragedy,"
as well as an American drama. It's not just about figures anymore.
It's about handcuffs, "perp walks," possible prison
time and the wrath of a ripped-off America down the back of a
family that's the white-collar high-speed-cable-connection equivalent
of the Mafia. A family that used that old mantra of the Right,
that Father-Knows-Best euphemism for Christian fundamentalism,
"Family Values," to censor public access TV, just as
they illegally cooked their books. Watch: they might use it in
their defense.
Family Values means family first, and
the Rigases certainly did put family first. The Rigas
Family, that is, and to hell with the community. Even the word
"community" is dangerously close to "Communist,"
isn't it? The Rigases believed in the Value of Family, and screw
the community! Screw the community of stockholders they screwed
out of their life savings. Screw the community of cable subscribers
they screwed out of their right to watch the TV shows of their
choice. Screw the community of their fellow Americans that they
and their fellow CEO-banditos at Enron, WorldCom, Halliburton,
Imclone, etc. screwed out of a decent economy.
Ironically, the Rigas Boys labeled my
shows "indecent." They were big on morality and small
on ethics. And morality--Family Values or Taliban Tradition--
has no place in business, especially not in big business, business
that is supposed to serve lots of people, many different families,
many communities. Ethics has a vital place in business. But not
morality, and certainly not moralizing. Fundamentalism is fundamentally
bad for business.
Some might say that the Rigas Family
Censors got a sexual thrill out of looting their own company.
Let's call it corporate rape. They certainly exhibited a perverse
pleasure in censoring me and the other sexuality shows. That's
non-consensual sex.
"From Paragons of Virtue to Symbols
of Greed" go the headlines. And as Symbols of Greed, they're
much more famous. Nobody knew who John J. Rigas was when I first
gave him the Book Burner Award for Censorship. Now he's so notorious
that TV movies could be made about him. I'm thinking Goldie Hahn
to play me. I'm the Harlot angle. Every TV movie has a Harlot
Angle. I'm the spurned sex therapist/talk show host. Can you
tell I'm excited?
And yetI have a few friends who have
been on the "perp walk." I don't wish it on anyone.
I've had the LAPD bust in on me at odd times of day and night.
I know what it is to be unfairly targeted by the police. And
maybe John Rigas didn't do ALL the things he's accused of. I
know what it is to be unjustly investigated or to have someone
you love unjustly accused. Almost makes me feel compassion for
the lousy little sanctimonious skunk.
Almost, but not quite. Rigas is low as
they go. Besides, it's personal. He deprived me of my civil liberties,
my right to freedom of speech, my public access to the
airwaves.
Why shouldn't he and his ravenous progeny
be deprived of liberty for a while?
Besides, they were cuffed in the front,
not the back (unlike Scott Sullivan and David Myers of WorldCom
and most suspects, who are cuffed in back, which is much more
uncomfortable). The Rigases were warned so they had time to shower
and shave and put on their casual clothes before being hauled
off for the perp walk, and the fact that they had their stockholders'
money in their own piggy pockets meant they could easily get
together the $30 million in bail to make this whole awful ordeal
end before sundown. As accused crooks go, they had it relatively
easy.
So I allow myself a bit of gloating,
luxuriating in my internationally broadcast Wall Street Journal-certified,
Jimmy Breslin-blessed, New Times coronated triumph over
my own little Evil Empire. Back on the air on Adelphia, my home
cable systems, covering the fleshpots of East LA, the Valley,
and West LA, including Beverly Hills, parts of Hollywood and
the Beach, the Sodom and Gomorrah that the Rigas Family Censors
sought to overtake in their obscenely overvalued Christian Crusade
to accumulate riches, power and influence, value for one family
and one family alone, the Rigas Family. And now they've been
caught and cuffed, a family of rats in a trap.
The irony is that the Bush Family caught
them! There's Prince Dubya, declaring over shots of those other
sons in cuffs that ''Today was a day of action and a day of accomplishmentthis
government will investigate, will arrest, and will prosecute
corporate executives who break the law.''
Well, the Resident might have added,
"some corporate executives who break the law. No
one that I know real well. No one I really need, like
Dick. And no one who's given me a lot of money, like Kenny-Boy.
And certainly no one in my family (Thank God and the Goddess
that the Rigases aren't related to the Bushes)."
And the bombs continue to rain on Afghanistan,
massacring wedding parties, murdering families, destroying whole
communities, and not finding Osama. Osama who? And what about
that Mullah Omar? He's only got one-eye, but we're blind to him.
And we're back to menacing Daddy Bush's old nemesis Saddam, which
means pelting Iraq with bombs, some smart but many exceedingly
dumb.
Well, at least tits are back on Adelphia.
Praise the Lord and the Lady! Amen and awomen. I remain the Irreverend
Doctor Susan Block, your humble public access cable TV sex therapist.
Stay tuned for more Greek tragedy, broken by bursts of Commedia
Erotica.
Dr. Susan Block is a sex educator, host of The Dr. Susan
Block Show and author of The 10 Commandments of Pleasure. Visit
her website at http://www.drsusanblock.com.
If you'd like to contact Dr. Susan Block
with questions, comments or contributions, please email liberties@blockbooks.com
Today's Features
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|