| 20 May 2006 Chamber of Commerce So, this was like a WAY weird week... I got dragged into a Federal court, not on charges, thank God, I couldn't afford a lawyer right now with the company on the ropes…and I am so behind on the e-mail that I feel like I am drowning….I opened one from a buddy back home, or from someplace that once was home, telling me they had rolled up a bunch of Lebanese in Detroit for illegal funds transfers, the implication being that they were bankrolling terrorists… They were operating out of a restaurant called Shish, and I got hungry thinking about it …I could use some decent Shish, as in kabab, but I really prefer schwarma like back in the Gulf, thin slices of lamb or beef slow-cooked as a cone next to the roaster and sliced paper thin...delicious savory sauce, yoghurt-based....of course the Lebanese might have been transferring money, maybe even to bad guys…but the Government is watching the Arab community like hawks these days…. I forget if the Lebanese are Arabs or not…I never went to the restaurant, since it was after my time in the Motor City…of course, that was so long ago that my neighborhood was mostly people of North European descent, which is soooo fifteen minutes ago….like the part of Virginia around Big Pink where I live was in the Confederacy and not El Salvador…I was thinking about that and restaurants in general…someone asked me why all those Chinese restaurants that don't seem to do a lot of business crop up near companies doing high-tech work... Geeks get hungry, I always thought….the People's Liberation Army owned a place across the street from a place I worked in the government, but I never thought much about it…the dim sum was good…they say the Chinese are stealing all the advanced technology they can get their hands on for fear we will wake up and start protecting it…so I got hungrier and that was when one of the eager beavers at the office called - still there at six at night- asking if I could make a breakfast meeting at the Ritz-Carlton over on 22nd Street...you know me and breakfast....I'm thinking Ritz-Carlton quality, free, probably one of those buffets with the unlimited sausage and bacon, and mounds of hash-browns and golden scrambled eggs… I didn't catch who was hosting the affair, but I said “Cool, see you at the office early and we'll cab over”… the hallmark of a good lobbyist breakfast is whether they have decent breakfast meats, you know, the big ticket stuff…shows you are serious about your influence….I am pretty sure that Jack Abramoff had decent sausage at his events when he was working the Hill....so I am in a cab going over there the next morning, still woozy from the court experience and that Mexican Coyote…I wondered what happened to him…I thought he looked guilty even if he appeared unconcerned…and Mike Hayden was doing his cool-as-a-cucumber thing with the Senate Intel Committee, and I think the Administration actually pulled one off this week…they defused the NSA eavesdropping thing and might have a shot at fixing the CIA, which is just as demoralized as the Department of Homeland Security with all the turnover in the leadership…our cabdriver was Eritrean, cool guy, and we talked about what assholes the invaders of his lovely country were, from the Italians to Heile Selassi (No, I'm highly delighted....) to the current crop of deadbeats from the former Somaliland, and we talked of the beauty of the Eritrean women, so tall and lithe, and about Djibouti, the old colony of Isis and Afars, and what pricks the French Foreign Legion were....he was born there, which is like so it's a small world... I finally slowed down long enough on the Eritrean Question to ask who was sponsoring the breakfast, and the eager beaver said the US-Arab Chamber of Commerce, and I said "Oh, shit, what do you think the chances are of them feeding us the flesh of unclean animals? It's gonna be yoghurt for breakfast!...the driver started laughing....sure enough, it was yoghurt and fruit and some pastries, not my idea of a Washington Breakfast at all, and a long table of oil companies and two members of the Kuwaiti Parliament…the oil execs were all slavering to get at the Northern Fields in Kuwait, which they say might be the seventh largest oil reserve in the world, and the reason Saddam invaded before the First Gulf War….the Kuwaitis have been trying to develop on their own terms, which is to say, the foreign oil companies can provide services but get no ownership, or book the reserves, which is all those bastards want...and that is why oil contracts have to ratified by the parliament so that the crooked oil ministry can't sell away the family patrimony...the whole thing was surprising, because the MPs were in town to talk about women's rights, but even the female execs just wanted to talk about the Northern Fields, their eyes getting all wide and their breathing shallow like, well, you know, and I am trying to catch the eyes of the Public Affairs officer for the Chamber, she is dark-eyed and full-breasted and so hot...I'm thinking Egyptian, maybe, or perhaps Syrian, so I wasn't paying attention to the subtleties about the Northern Fields, which clearly were Kuwait's last shot at the big oil money...when it is gone, it is gone.... the little Persian guy next to me, Teymour, I think he said, represents a firm that used to be the British Bank of the Middle East, but is now the Bank of Shanghai and Hong-Kong and just bought Wachovia…he asked a banking question and there was a near riot at the table…. The U.S. Chairman of the Chamber went ballistic, unusual for a former State Department guy, saying that no Arab money had legally been transferred to the U.S. since 9-11, and the USAPatriot Act was so screwed up was a wonder that the real friends of America still talked to us, like these Kuwaitis who gave us the beachhead to go into Iraq, and the Emir of Dubai who services our warships and lets our Sailors walk around unmolested and builds indoor ski resorts in the desert… even after the absolutely crappy way we treated him over the Ports World fiasco....but the banking question hit the nail on the head...our policy has been to bludgeon some pretty good people on the way to punishing a few assholes...OK, a lot of assholes...and there was a fervent resolution at the table to draft a strong white paper and send it at the government from all directions, like this Administration would have a clue about the law of unintended consequences....then my co-worker asked about teledensity in Kuwait, thinking it was low, like Iraq where we do some business, like maybe seven cell phones per hundred residents, and I was embarrassed, since everyone laughed...Kuwaiti teledensity is like 200%, since everyone has at least two phones....I kept looking at the PAO officer...God, she was hot...oh, but that is a long way around the rose bush to say that I wrote my buddy back and said I knew why those Lebanese were doing the hanky-panky with money...it is impossible to transfer it legally, even if you can get past that little "no usury" thing in the Koran...so once again we have the Feds running in circles trying to stop people from investing with their families and other perfectly legal stuff...that is why all the really well-heeled Arabs are pulling out of here and heading for London where they don't get hassled all the time...my fear is that they are going to take all the really hot Arab women with them and leave the ones in the hajibs, you know? Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |