Around one o’clock this afternoon, I was working alone at my desk on petroleum market models. I had just wound up a four hour marathon meeting with a Saudi diplomat, and had promised him some immediate results. The Saudis have known about the odd nature of the petroleum supply curve since the early 1980’s, when an American consultant, working on a DOE contract to determine the availability of raw materials for electric car manufacturing, discovered that the supply curves for the major metals needed for electric cars and, of course, their batteries – copper, aluminum, nickel, chromium, lead, zinc, lithium, and so forth – all shared the same, characteristic sigmoidal shape. That, the poor devil determined, was due to nothing less than the Lord Almighty Himself, Who, in His infinite wisdom, had seen fit to design the Universe in such a way that the laws of its physics and chemistry dictated a log-normal distribution of cumulative ore tonnage with respect to grade. Being much too clever for his own good, this fellow then wondered if perhaps a similar situation might obtain for petroleum. Thinking about that was not, as one might well imagine, in his Statement of Work, but he no doubt figured it would be okay to think about it on his own time. So he did, and determined that yes, indeed, at each petroleum grade, the cumulative volume of petroleum deposits are log-normally distributed with respect to their size. Add them all up, and you get a distribution that results in the same S-shaped curve. Nobody, not the oil companies, not the environmentalists, and certainly not the members of OPEC, wanted to believe that, though, since it implies two very significant things none of them really want to hear. The first thing is, there is so damn much oil in the world, if we burned it all, the resulting global warming would turn it into a place resembling Venus; that basically, our real problem with petroleum is, and always been, that we have too much of it, not too little. The second thing – and this is what gave, and is still giving OPEC a serious case of the willies – if the petroleum supply curve is just like those for hard rock minerals, then any oil cartel will face the same fate as that of the cartels formed to fix prices for all those other commodities, that of becoming an impotent factor in a market where the commodity price cannot be sustained above a predetermined level over which the cartel has no control. So, obviously, nobody with stakes in the oil game, one way or the other, could bring themselves to believe what that inquisitive gentleman had discovered, and, consequently, they simply refused to do so. On the other hand, people with no particular petroleum ox to be gored, or pile of chips riding in the oil game, readily realized the predictive power of the petroleum supply curve. I remember that when I first encountered it, about ten years ago, it made perfect, elegant sense to me – any time the price of oil, adjusted for contained net energy content and normalized against the price of light, sweet crude, rises above the curve’s point of unitary elasticity of supply, huge surpluses begin to accumulate, after which the oil market inevitably crashes and OPEC has to go running to Saudi Arabia and beg them to decrease their production to support prices against further declines. Sound familiar? So there I was, as, no doubt, many other highly compensated consultants all over the globe were this afternoon, doing this and that “what if” analysis, trying to identify a strategy to pull OPEC’s chestnuts out of the fire one more time, running mathematical models based on a petroleum supply curve nobody who cares about oil, one way or the other, wants to believe. So it is written – but Allah is omniscient.
Then Gretchen walked into my office and told me that my dear sister Rose had arrived, and was waiting in the reception area. “She seems…” Gretchen whispered, “kind of upset.”
“Send her in,” I sighed, forsaking, once again, good paying work for uncompensated filial duty.
Rose gave me her patented big-sister hug and curled up on the couch as I resumed my seat, leaning back for a long breath, waiting for the latest tragic family news.
“Tom,” she sobbed, “it’s Shannon.”
“Your sister-in-law? I mean, your husband’s brother’s wife?”
“Of course,” Rose snapped, giving me her patented look that says “what – are you stupid?”
“So, she has a problem, then,” I dryly responded. “Tell me about it.”
“Well,” Rose began as I handed her one of my Dior hankies, “you know how it is out at our place these days, what with Hank and me and our kids sharing the house with Hank’s brother and Shannon and all their kids, ever since the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. And Shannon always making catty remarks about the house – just because it isn’t that… palace in Reston she had to give up to move in with us because she and her husband couldn’t afford the adjustable rate payments. At least Hank and I had enough sense not to buy a million dollar house, that’s what I feel like telling her…”
“Instead,” I suggested, being thoroughly familiar, and quite tired of hearing about Roses’ travails with two large, blended Catholic families living in close quarters to get by during hard times, “why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”
“Okay,” she continued, “it all started last night, when her mother called her about one of her brothers from Chicago. He works in the Illinois governor’s office…”
“Oh, my God,” I exclaimed, “how close is this guy to Blagojevich?”
Rose stared at me blankly. “Who?”
“Rod R. Blagojevich,” I clarified as I resumed my chair, “is the governor of Illinois.”
“Shannon says,” Rose wailed, “he’s one of the governor’s top aides.”
“Very close, then?”
“To hear Shannon tell it,” Rose spat ruefully, “they’re best friends for life or something! You know Tom, you’ve heard her, always bragging about her family’s hotsy-totsy connections in the Chicago Democratic machine; how her relatives are big-time operators in Illinois politics.”
“Seems to me,” I reminisced, “that I recall being regaled with rather grand tales of that nature during various visits out there to Fairfax. But I don’t recall her mentioning the brother who works for the governor.”
“Oh, she has, plenty of times,” Rose assured me. “I know you, Tom. You just tune her out when she starts up on that kind of stuff at family gatherings.”
“True,” I confessed, “I tune out anybody who starts up on that kind of stuff at family gatherings; and I’m sure I’m not alone in having that habit, either. So, anyway, it seems she wasn’t fabricating the story, at least. Her brother is close to Blagojevich, and Shannon’s upset about the… ah, recent developments.”
“Upset?” Rose shook her head dejectedly. “Insane’s more like it. The elementary-aged kids tell me she was there after work yesterday, just like we have it arranged, to meet them when they get home from school, and everything seemed normal. Then her mother called her cell phone. After that, they say, she grabbed a fresh bottle of Powers Gold Label and started calling all over Illinois. And that,” Rose sniffed, “is how I found her when I got home with the pre-schoolers about two hours later. Except that…” she stopped, clearly beside herself with anxiety.
“Except what?”
“Half the Powers was gone!” Rose whimpered. “And she was a raving Celtic maniac.”
“Ah, the Irish,” I mused, “’the race that God made mad. For all their wars are happy, and all their songs are sad.’”
“And,” Rose added, “they do both of those things the most when they’re drunk.”
“Don’t forget,” I admonished, “that the Celts invented the ballad, the shillelagh and the whiskey to go with them.”
“And leprechauns and banshees,” Rose observed, “which I’m sure they regularly see every time they drink half a fifth of Powers Gold Label in one sitting! What,” she pressed me adamantly, “is Shannon getting hammered and yakking to her Chicago Irish relatives about until three in the morning? Why is she in bed with a hangover the size of Connaught, calling in sick to work today, leaving me with hardly enough time to get all the children off to school, then take off from work myself and miss an important meeting, burning up what little annual leave I have, to rush out here and talk to you before I have to dash back to Fairfax before elementary school lets out?”
“Let’s look at the facts,” I offered, using a phrase often employed with my paying clients, “and see if they explain anything. Governor Blagojevich was arrested this morning.”
“He was?” This was news to Rose, apparently, but who could blame her? She had probably been so preoccupied with assuming Shannon’s duties there hadn’t been time to consult the news media about anything. Today, a space ship from Alpha Centauri could have landed on the White House lawn and she would have missed the story. “The governor Illinois got arrested? By who?”
“The feds.”
“Feds?”
“The Justice Department – Federal marshals and FBI agents, representing the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to be precise.”
“For what?”
“Corruption.”
Rose pondered momentarily, then spoke. “Hank told me that when Shannon and her husband first moved to Washington, she ran up about two thousand dollars in parking tickets all over the place, until they booted her car – out in Arlington, I think it was. She flagged down a cop and offered him a hundred bucks to take the boot off, and he wrote her another ticket instead. So then, she gets her husband on the cell phone and says ‘Okay, who do I call to get these tickets fixed and get the boot off the car?’ He says ‘Honey, they don’t do things here like they do back in Chicago. You’ll have to pay all the tickets before they’ll take the boot off.’ She was livid. I mean, Tom, she had absolutely no concept, whatsoever. So obviously, things are different in Chicago – everybody else knows that, even if maybe Chicagoans think the rest of the world is like that, too, which, as Shannon found out, it’s not. I guess what I’m asking, Tom, is, given those kinds of circumstances, what could an Illinois politician possibly do that would get him arrested for corruption? I mean, really, does the word ‘corruption’ even have a definition in a place like Chicago?”
“Good question,” I remarked. “The capital of Illinois is Springfield, of course, not Chicago, but from what I’ve heard, it’s not that different there, either, and while fixing traffic tickets isn’t quite as easy, ‘you still gotta pay to play.’ Be that as it may, though, according to the initial reports, Blagojevich had something a lot of people wanted – by Illinois law, he was the person designated to appoint the individual who will replace Barack Obama in the United States Senate after Obama leaves the Senate to become President. The first thing he did was make sure that everybody interested in having that post in Washington knew that he, Blagojevich, could legally appoint himself if he wanted to, and that he wouldn’t rule out doing it, either. Allegedly, of course, he did that so as to place the highest value he could on the Senate seat. Then, allegedly, he engaged in a number of extremely imprudent telephone conversations, which the US Attorney, having obtained a secret US court order to wiretap him, duly transcribed. In those conversations, he allegedly tried to get interested parties to give him things in return for appointment to the Senate.”
Rose, now intently curious, looked up from her handkerchief. “Such as?”
“Well,” I resumed, “the US Attorney, again alledgedly, says that he leaned on people to contribute money to his campaign fund, and that he offered to trade the Senate appointment for a US cabinet post or an ambassadorship. They have recordings of him saying that a US Senate seat is ‘a valuable thing’ that ‘you don’t give away for nothing.’ They also allege that he asked people interested in going to the Senate to put his wife on corporate boards, for salaries up to $150,000 a year. They claim he pressured candidates to get him high-paying jobs with non-profit organizations connected to labor unions. They say they have a recording of Blagojevich where he mentions that somebody has offered him $500,000 cash in exchange for the appointment.”
“That’s pretty blatant,” Rose opined.
“There’s other stuff too,” I went on. “They say they caught him threatening to illegally obstruct sale of Wrigley Field, which is owned by the Chicago Tribune, unless the paper put his people on the Tribune editorial board. They claim he was part of massive kickback schemes where people had to pay him and his confederates money to get state jobs, and blackmailed the Chicago Children’s Memorial Hospital, threatening to withhold $8 million in state funding if he wasn’t paid a $50,000 bribe. The US Attorney proclaimed the governor’s actions to be part of a ‘political corruption crime spree’ that’s been under secret federal investigation for several years. The FBI agent in charge told reporters that ‘If Illinois isn’t the most corrupt state in the Union, it’s certainly one hell of a competitor.’ All of which is pretty ironic when you consider the fact that Blagojevich portrayed himself as a reformer who was going to clean up Illinois politics after the previous governor, a fellow named George Ryan, was convicted on charges of rampant corruption in his administration.”
“Incredible,” Rose muttered. “But why would Shannon be so worried about her brother? There’s no such thing as guilt by association, after all. He just worked for the Blagojevich administration.”
“There’s one other item,” I warned her. “The US Attorney alleges that Governor Blagojevich held a conference call, in which at least his chief of staff, John Harris, and one other ‘key advisor’ participated. During that call, the wiretaps record Blagojevich talking about his family’s financial needs, and stating that he, Blagojevich, wanted a position that pays at least $250,000 to $300,000 per year in exchange for the Senate appointment. If Shannon’s brother was in on that conference call, even if he didn’t say anything…”
“He would have known about it!” Rose sat up excitedly. “And it wouldn’t matter if he was in on the illegal activity, either!”
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “So, maybe that’s…”
Rose’s cell phone played the opening strains of “E lucevan le stella.” After a quick glance to see who was calling, she answered. “Hello Shannon, how are you feeling? No, no, I’m fine; I’m downtown, visiting Tom. What do you think we’re talking about? You did? And? Really? Okay. Are you going to be able to meet the elementary school kids when they get home, or do you need to stay in… all right, all right, good. Now I can stop by the office for a couple of hours and try to catch up. Sure, sure, no problem, I understand. You’re welcome, dear. This is a family, and that’s what families all about, right? You, too. Okay, ‘bye.”
The cell phone swept back into her purse as an immense wave of relief swept over Rose. Almost instantly, she was her usual self again. “That was Shannon. Her mother sat her brother down and gave him the third degree, and it looks like he’s in the clear. She says her mother told her he wasn’t even in his office when that conference call was made.”
“That’s great,” I smiled. “Where was he?”
“Dead drunk at Sammy’s Sports Bar,” she smiled back.
At that, I opened the credenza and poured out two shot glasses of Connemara cask strength single malt, placing one in Rose’s hand while raising the other in mine. “Here,” I cheerfully declared, “is to the blessed luck of the Irish!”