This Just In: There’s No Such Thing as a Miracle Cure. Especially for Public Education. (Especially for Public Education!)

We’re not sure what the world needs at this particular point in history, but we’re almost certain what it doesn’t need is another story in the media extolling the KIPP program as the savior of public education (the examples are many so we’ll not single out any particular one). You’re probably familiar with the formula: a journalist drops in at a KIPP school (or at KIPP’s cousin in Houston, YES Prep) for a few hours, consults the voluminous clips on the Houston-born-and-raised charter schools, then knocks off a quick piece on the supposed wonders that KIPP has wrought with allegedly hard-to-educate “minority” and “inner city” students. It’s an easy space- or time-filler, and the kind of tale the media digs: a pre-scripted feel-good story with a foregone happy ending and nary a hint of ambivalence.

One journalist who’s actually probed beyond the conventional story line is Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s respected and knowledgeable education reporter, whose stories and blog entries, at least the ones we’ve read, still come down very (very) favorably for KIPP. Mathews has new book out on KIPP, Work Hard. Be Nice. (the KIPP slogan---it beats “Down With Ossified and Dogmatic Thought,” but just barely), which this week received a thorough going-over in Slate from Sarah Mosle, who casts a hard but not wholly critical eye at both the book and KIPP itself. (Yeah, we’re approaching this subject at a second-hand remove, at least, not having read Mathews’ book, but we’re invoking Blogger’s Prerogative, whatever that is.)

One thing that’s always bugged us a little about all these KIPP success stories, whether based on statistic or anecdote, is that the media invariably fail to acknowledge the obvious built-in advantages that charters have over their non-magnet public-school counterparts. We’re talking about two things: The fact that parents who seek to place their kids in charter schools, even if admittance itself is “random,” obviously have more wherewithal (mental, for sure, if not financial and moral) than parents who are unable or can’t be bothered to try to get theirs out of low-performing neighborhood schools (the ones trying to raise their rankings from “hellish” to “nightmarish”), or aren’t aware of the alternatives (or can’t get out of bed to fill out the application). The second advantage is that the charters contractually obligate students and parents to meet standards of behavior, effort and involvement---something that public schools generally can’t do (outside of grade requirements that must be met at magnets, or most magnets). If the charter’s imposed standards of time and effort aren’t met, the kid gets a one-way ticket back to his zoned school.

The danger in all this is that it risks turning many public schools into default holding pens for the discipline problems and chronic low-performers. You can see this happening in Houston at the middle-school level, where savvy working- and lower-middle-class Hispanic parents scramble to get their kids into KIPP or YES or anywhere but their sorry, gangsta-incubating zoned schools---where, just like at home, they have to take you in.

This doesn’t mean that KIPP’s success isn’t real, but it does means that it merits at least a small asterisk, and raises questions about whether that success can translate on a wider scale. Slate’s Mosle, a former Teach for America teacher, has the goods, and we’re going to break with tradition here and quote at length from her piece, the thesis of which she states at the outset, declaring that KIPP

… is not the proven, replicable model for eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a thing doesn't exist.

After voicing that sobering heresy, Mosle points out that

… Mathews likens KIPP to a cult "without the dues or the weird robes." But by definition, a cult is a fringe movement. To date, no one—including such mighty players as the Gates Foundation—has figured out how to take an educational cult and make it the predominant religion within any urban system.

Mathews insists that KIPP has solved this riddle. It's true that perhaps no other model program has risen so far so fast, with such consistently strong test scores. KIPP now has 66 academies in 19 states. Still, 66 academies amount to just three schools, on average, per state. Houston has far and away the highest concentration with, currently, seven middle schools, three elementary schools, and one high school. But this is in a school system with 200,000 students, nearly 80 percent of whom qualify for reduced or free lunches. At the moment, like every other model program before it, KIPP serves only a tiny fraction of disadvantaged students within any given district. And as education researcher Richard Rothstein has rightly noted, comparing students from different schools, even within the same disadvantaged neighborhoods, is very difficult to do in a rigorous, scientific way. Just because KIPP uses a lottery for admissions, for example, does not tell us anything about the self-selecting nature of the pool from which this lottery is drawn. (Rothstein's own research—here and here—has shown that KIPP students come from families that are better off, or better educated, than their regular public school or special-education counterparts.)

What is more, KIPP's approach is implicitly, but obviously, not designed to suit all students—or, for that matter, all parents or teachers. For decades, educators argued that disadvantaged children could succeed if only they received the same education as more advantaged, middle-class students. Many, if not most, of the nation's best public and private schools are decidedly progressive, with less emphasis on test scores and more on critical thinking skills, with rich arts, music, sports, and other extracurricular programs. Why shouldn't poorer children enjoy the same?

But KIPP is not the same. The program has usefully changed the debate by acknowledging the obvious: Kids who grow up poor, with no books or with functionally illiterate parents, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, with destructive peer influences and without access to basic medical care (such as glasses to help them read), need something significantly more than—and different from—kids who grow up with every economic and educational advantage on which to build. For one, the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m.until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday.

... Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids from less involved or determined families. While KIPP does have outreach efforts to broaden its applicant pool, only the most determined parents are likely to respond to such overtures and sign KIPP's demanding contract. This dedication suggests a higher value on education within these families, and thus kids better able or willing to learn. And the weakest students, not surprisingly, get disproportionately winnowed. In KIPP's schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the worst-performing kids have dropped out (or been expelled) in greater numbers in the higher grades; the result has been to inflate the schools' grade-to-grade improvement.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, or just admire the stripping away of an artfully arranged veneer, you should read Mosle’s entire piece. It’s another reminder that if something’s sold as too good to be true it most certainly is, as Sir R. Allen Stanford may have remarked (in private).

Pynchon at the Ship Channel: Another Unsolved Houston Mystery

Some weeks back, before we were forced to temporarily suspend blogurbatin’ here at Slampo’s Place due to a, um, conflict with the tax-collecting agency (and other crazy-making but passing vexations), we posted, in conjunction with the publication of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, a choice passage from an appreciation of Barthelme penned in the early 1990s by Sr. Thomas Pynchon. The Pynchon essay appeared as an introduction to a posthumous collection of Barthelme’s works and spoke rather poignantly, we thought, to what Pynchon described as his fellow scribbler’s long “love-hate affair” with Houston, where he was reared, grew to adulthood (a ’hood that included a stint as a critic on the long-since-expired newspaper out on the freeway, before it was out the freeway, the same publication whose other illustrious alumni include seminal local blogger Banjo Jones) and to which he returned, at least part time, before his death in 1989. We discerned a larger truth in Pynchon’s take on Barthelme’s “affair” with Houston, because we don’t know anyone with at least half a brain (arbitrary percentage) who’s lived here longer than, say, 5 years (arbitrary length of residency) who isn’t at least deeply ambivalent about the place (that is to say, has come to the realization that Houston has its charms, aside from the cheap cost of living [which, of course, stems from the town’s historical reliance on cheap labor], although these things are usually unadvertised and make themselves known over time, while also recognizing that Houston can be a colossal pain in the rear, not only on a grand damning metaphysical scale but in the mere day-to-day gettin’-along sense).

Anyhoo, it had occurred to us when we first read the Pynchon essay many years ago that Pynchon possessed more than a cursory knowledge of Houston, like he had spent some time here in the ’60s, visiting a girlfriend, perhaps, or maybe he had used Baghdad-on-the-Bayou as a port of call on his way down to Mexico, where he reportedly was known to hang. Whatever the case, his essay on Barthelme exhibited a pronounced knowingness about the town. Shortly after the above-mentioned post we received an email from our pal Il Pinguino, one of the city’s most accomplished belle letterists, mentioning that he had been told by a professor acquaintance that Pynchon had actually lived for a spell in Houston back in the ’60s. On further questioning, Il determined that the notion was set in proximate motion by Larry McMurtry and was mentioned in his recent non-fiction book, Books, a run-through of McMurtry’s days as a book dealer in Houston, the Bay Area, D.C. and now Archer City. (The prof also pointed out to Il that Buffalo Bayou is mentioned in one of the sing-alongs that punctuate Gravity’s Rainbow; this would have meant nothing to us when we read the book 35 years ago during the many slack hours in our seafaring days with Arthur Levy Boat Co. of Morgan City, La.)

We checked out Books from our fine Houston Public Library System---it is, by the way, an oddly flat and joyless tome, but perhaps only in light of our stereotyped expectations of the eccentrics who trade in the antiquarian book racket---and sure enough, the Pynchon-in-Houston tale is told therein by McMurtry, albeit in a curious, tossed-off manner. We have returned the book, not wishing to fall into arrears with another public agency, but if we remember correctly the highly inconclusive story went something like this: McMurtry writes he "may" missed his chance to meet the publicity-shy (which is a whole different thing than “reclusive,” the usual adjective applied to Pynchon) writer, who was "said" to be living "somewhere near the Ship Channel" when McMurtry was teaching at Rice in the mid-'60s (McMurtry’s Rice-area residence being the site of an infamous 1964 visit by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they wended their way to the New York World’s Fair on their psychedelic bus, a visit immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, during which an acid-addled Prankster whom Wolfe called “Stark Naked” streaked nude from the bus and maternally pressed her “skinny breast” to McMurtry’s young son, future distinguished singer-songwriter James, whom Ms. Naked had mistaken for her own spawn*).

So where were we? Yeah, this story of McMurtry’s: He also relates that that Pynchon was "said" to need work and that he had sent Pynchon a "note" mentioning that he might be able to arrange something for him in the local grove of academia, but Pynchon replied with a "note" of his own declining the offer (and thank Baby Jesus for that). Why they didn’t get together for aperitifs is left unexplained, but it couldn’t have been that difficult, since the distance between West U and the Ship Channel is not that great, at least miles-wise. McMurtry apparently did not keep the note from Pynchon, the auction of which today might finance the purchase of a sizable lot of used books. Then again, McMurtry rounds out the story by saying it's possible that neither note was actually sent. Hmmm. Maybe it was all a dream, or he misremembers.

That was pretty much it---no explanation of why Pynchon might have been living by the Ship Channel, or where, or what year(s) specifically this might have been. If it was in ’64 or ’65, then Pynchon wouldn’t exactly have been a struggling unknown, as V. had been published in 1963 and won that year’s Faulkner Prize. Next up, in 1966, would be The Crying of Lot 49---is it possible that Pynchon wrote some of the small classic American treatise on paranoia while holed up in some sailor-man’s boarding house on Navigation?

We are a Pynchon fan, not a Pynchon obsessive (we plan to get around to reading the 1,000-plus-page Against the Day one day, most certainly if we find our self with a lot of time on our hands while pulling a prison stretch for tax evasion), so it’s possible that the Pynchon-in-Houston story has been well-hashed over on the Pynchon mailing list, or elsewhere that obsessives electronically gather to obsess, and we simply were unaware of it. The only other mention we can find of a Pynchon-Houston connection, and it’s a fleeting and obscure one, is in this tongue-in-cheek (we think it is, anyway) essay that appeared in Harper’s in 2001 and links Barthelme to the bizarre “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” attack on his fellow former Houstonian, Dan Rather, on a New York City street in 1986.** This mention predates the McMurtry book but appeared long after Pynchon’s essay on Barthelme, so who knows:

Donald Barthelme is one of my literary heroes. Thomas Pynchon—no stranger to Houston, I might add—described Barthelme, lovingly, as “perhaps a species of anarchist curse.”

(The author of this piece, Paul Limbert Allman, appears not to have written much else in the way of paranoiac literary/crime theory but seems to be or was a writer of books for young adults, including one whose description sounds downright Pynchonesque. Hmmm.)

Other wispy emanations suggest that Pynchon is “no stranger” to Houston: the epigraph from 1990's Vineland comes from a song by the late Houston bluesman Johnny “Clyde” Copeland (“Every dog has its day, and a good dog just might have two”) and, as the authoritative PynchonWiki puts it, the author is “known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.” Maybe Pynchon saw ’em both, back in the day. The mind reels with possibility … it do!

Our own theory is that Pynchon, a Navy veteran who has always seemed deeply knowledgeable in the ways of the water, may have hung his hat here briefly while working as a deckhand or as a crew member of some vessel, perhaps an ocean-going one or one that plied the Ship Channel (as the late Sterling Morrison*** did some 20 years later), possibly to get away from the encroaching fame his first novel was bringing, or possibly to woodshed and write (and what better place to hide away than the east side of Houston in the 1960s!). We wonder whether Pynchon, who supposedly underwent orthodontic work in the 1960s, may have visited our Uncle Ansley the dentist, who made a modest living for many years fixing the teeth of longshoremen and seafarers out of his small office on Broadway.****

True or not, the Pynchon-in-Houston mystery nicely reflects the elusive nature of both the man and his work, and if he even lived here for just one cold, lonely month, that seals the deal: This is one World Class city! (We expect the first 3-day “Pynchon Festival” to get under way at Discovery Green by 2012, at the latest. BYOB.)


*"Everything connects," or so declares this Pynchon obsessive, whom we knew slightly back in '70 or '71 before he got a high lottery number, joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he pulled duty in a typing pool, we believe.

**Everything connects!

***Everything etc!

****Everyth ...

Modern Protest, Houston-Style

So black and Hispanic leader types want their respective peoples to boycott the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo on the night that Caucasian country singer Clint Black is scheduled to perform.

That should be wildly successful, but isn't it a little like calling in sick on your day off?

But Seriously: Who's the Daddy?

We noticed that our mayor gingerly sidestepped responsibility for that obviously knuckleheaded proposal to subsidize the credit-worthiness of would-be Houston homebuyers with funds originally set aside for Ike-necessitated repairs. According to Wednesday's follow-up by the Chronicle's Carolyn Feibel

While the mayor is responsible for what appears on the council's weekly agenda, White placed the genesis of the idea with the city's Department of Housing & Community Development. He said the staff member's intentions were good.

"As the mortgage markets are collapsing, banks are no longer buying mortgages, then people who can afford a house are not able to buy a house and that's what the staff was trying to address," White said.

Setting aside the question of whether this is a matter a municipal government should "address"---it's not, but let's move on---and ignoring the faulty characterization of the would-be beneficiaries of the now-junked (?) program as "people who can afford a house," we must wonder aloud why White seems to be escaping blame for this hastily aborted (?) fiasco. The Chronicle editorial page, in a recently unprecedented display of timeliness, administered a quick tsk-tsking to the "World Class Folly" but in doing so turned uncharacteristically "playful":

Maybe, it was just some smarty-pants staffer's idea of an April Fool's joke played a month early.

No, please, let's give blame where blame is due: White's the mayor, making housing in the inner-city "affordable" has been one of his high-profile initiatives, and the way we've always understood it the mayor has an agenda director whose job is to do what that title suggests (direct the council agenda). The agenda director works for the mayor. We can only assume that Councilwoman Pam Holm, in blaming the proposal's emergence on "poor leadership," was referring to the mayor, although that would be an unusually direct form of finger-pointing that would deserve the striking of a commemorative plaque. Maybe she was just talking about some anonymous, well-intentioned smarty-pants staffer.

In any case, Feibel's reporting---and by the way, these are the sort of stories you'll miss when the daily newspaper goes the way of the mastodon, miss as in "I miss my mommy" and miss as in you'll never hear about it---has turned a fertile bed for further inquiry. The reporter quotes Housing Director Richard Celli---he works for White, too, right?---saying that only one of 872 home-buying families for whom the city has provided down payments and closing costs during White's tenure has been foreclosed upon. Hmm. That seems to be an almost unbelievably salutary figure, one we assume is documented somewhere on paper. Beyond the technicality of foreclosure, though, we wonder how many of these families are actually iving in the houses they contracted to buy, and what their presence has done for the blocks where they've settled (admittedly a difficult question to qualify, but maybe it's just all good and if so props to the mayor, etc.).

Stanford! Stanford! (Rah Rah Rah)

We have a confession, and we feel a little dirty making it: For the past week or so we have been in the thrall of a wickedly demonic force, a power that has rendered us all but helpless. You know what we’re talking about: that insatiable urge to learn every goddamn thing we can about Sir R. Allen Stanford and his financial legerdemain (which, according to Friday's Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department now believes was the result of a Ponzi scheme---shocking, no?)

The addiction is understandable: a “scandal” whose geographical coordinates include Mexia, Texas, Washington D.C., Galleria, Texas and the Caribbean island of Antigua and which has ensnared such diverse personages as Sir John Cornyn and Sir Johnny Damon has unmistakably high entertainment value (unless you were a, um, Stanford client) and is certainly deserving of attention. But we realized on Friday night that we might have a serious problem when we momentarily thought they were projecting Sir Al’s smiling visage on the Toyota Center’s Jumbo screen during a time out in the Rockets-Mavs game (on closer inspection it turned out to be only some contest winner or season ticket holder with a faint resemblance to the mustachioed financial genius).

We’re sure this will pass, shortly, and we can return to our normal late-night pursuits (sleeping the sleep of the just), but in the meantime we can’t get enough of that Stanford stuff, wherever it comes from and however “true” it may be. And we have many willing enablers.

The Houston Chronicle, which didn’t exactly hop right onto the story (its initial offering, buried inside the paper’s rapidly disappearing business section, was a reprint of the Feb. 13 New York Times story reporting the feds’ scrutiny of Stanford---at least they ran it on the same day), has recovered somewhat and is now assiduously squeezing every possible dollop of juice from the Stanford lemon by instituting its own Stanford Watch blog for the collection and distribution of Google-alerted news items regarding Mexia’s prodigal son. The newspaper, which just a couple of months ago wouldn’t spring to send a reporter to Denver for the crash of that Houston-bound Continental flight, even loosened the pursestrings to dispatch a lucky scribe to Antigua on a Stanford-spelunking mission. (The local paper produced an interesting and very readable profile of Sir Smilin’ Al in its Sunday editions, a story that answered one of the crucial questions regarding Stanford: whether he affects a British accent. [Answer: Yes, apparently he does!])

But the Stanford Watch blog is not the last word on all things Stanford---that distinction belongs to TPMuckraker, which as the true cognoscenti know has been nailing developments in the Stanford saga with a pleasing frequency, including digging up those pictures of Pete Sessions with Stanford in Antigua after the Dallas congressman’s office denied that he knew Sir Al.

Yes, this is a delicious turn of events, nicely illustrating the cozy corruption not only of Washington D.C. (the Times reported on Saturday that “Texas Republicans” single-handedly killed White House-backed and Stanford-opposed legislation to force banks to crack down on money-laundering) but also of the “financial advisory” racket. It appears that the Stanford M.O. was to spread around just enough gold-plated manure---“five-star” meals, trips to the Caribbean, sponsorship of sporting events, charitable donations, etc.---to impress the too-easily impressed and have them give him things (preferential treatment, their life savings ...).

Pynchon on Barthelme and Houston

Reviews of the new biography of Donald Barthelme (Michael Berryhill had one in Sunday's Chronicle, but we can't find it online so here's one from the Washington Post and a nice appreciation of the writer himself in Time) sent us back to the introduction Thomas Pynchon wrote for a posthumous collection of Barthelme stories that was published about 10 years ago (if we remember correctly). Pynchon’s essay was helpful in calling our attention to the general pissed-offedness that pervaded Barthelme’s works---a sense of grievance tempered by his “hopeful and unbitter heart,” as Pynchon wrote. (We are certainly no expert on Barthelme, having left unfinished many if not most of his pieces that we waded into, although some thrummed a deep chord---we’re thinking especially of that exquisite sentence Barthelme titled Sentence, which is in some collection or another of his stories.) But the essay is most notable for the way Pynchon bullseyes the Houston of the 1950s and early ’60s and the mark if left on Barthelme, who was unable to shake free of his hometown until he was past 30 and was to return here later, and die here (Pynchon's off on a "fact" or two but nails the essence):

On the principle that you can take the boy out of the country but not vice versa, Houston, Texas, his hometown before New York, must have caused Barthelme some lively internal discomfort over the course of a love-hate affair with the place that went on, it seems, for most of his life. From what I remember of Houston at about that same time, it could have provoked the one emotion just as easily as the other, and in Texas-size quantities, too. The Astrodome was brand new in those days. Air conditioning in the city was ubiquitous. There were schemes afoot to put a dome over part of downtown and air-condition it, creating what today we would call a mall. Entire boulevards were dedicated to churches, side by side, one after another, allowing you to drop the family car in low and actually cruise places of worship. The nearest venue for dope, sex, and rock 'n' roll, then as now, was Austin. The new NASA space center out by Buffalo Bayou was hiring heavily, while from the marshlands around it, mosquitoes were busy spreading an encephalitis epidemic. Sir John Barbirolli had fashioned of the Houston symphony an exquisitely first-rate instrument, while teenage musical heresy focused on California surf culture -- though the Gulf only had surf during hurricanes, all kinds of kids could still be observed driving around with some stick in some woody, flaunting boards that never caught a wave, as if trying to make it all be California. Anyplace but what it was.

Things We Never Knew … About Sir Allen Stanford and His Sticky Wicket

We’re sorry to admit that the name “R. Allen Stanford” wouldn’t have rung even a faint bell with us before we read this morning’s New York Times, wherein it was reported that a veritable panoply of federal agencies have been eyeballing a Houston-based money management firm and offshore bank operated by the “the flamboyant Texas billionaire.” We’re even sorrier that we hadn’t liquidated our piddling little E-Trade account and turned our life savings over to Mr. Stanford, whose talent for generating Madoff-sized returns for clients apparently aroused the feds’ interest.

According to the Times, which was following a Bloomberg report from earlier this week, the focus of investigations by the SEC, FBI and IRS appears to be how Stanford’s Antigua-based bank "could issue CDs that pay interest rates that are more than twice the national average." These felicitous yields apparently contributed to the good fortune enjoyed by the “well-heeled clients” of the Galleria-headquartered Stanford Financial Services (whose number, Forbes reported last year, include or included golfer Vijay Singh).*

We’ll await the verdict of higher authorities on whether Mr. Stanford has been in violation of banking or securities law or is simply the Unacknowledged Super Genius of the Western Hemisphere, but in the meantime we will state without equivocation that he certainly is an intriguing character, the kind that Our Town has been notoriously lax in producing of late.

As the Times noted, Mr. Stanford presents himself to the world as Sir Allen Stanford, a title bestowed on him by a former Antiguan prime minister. The anglophilia must run deep, as he’s also besotted by cricket, a sport of sorts that we do not believe was seen on the playing fields of Mexia, from whence Stanford hails, or at Baylor, where he was educated, or in the Houston of the 1980s, where he is said to have made his first serious money buying and selling distressed properties in the Oil Bust market. According to his biography on his firm’s Web site, Stanford no longer calls Houston home but resides in St. Croix on the U.S. Virgin Islands and “holds dual citizenship, having become a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda ten years ago.”

This 2003 Wall Street Journal story portrayed Stanford as a large presence on the small island, where magic can happen:

An Antiguan citizen since 1999, Mr. Stanford is underwriting the construction by a Chinese company of a majestic state hospital now mired in a corruption scandal and new executive offices for the government. He is spending undisclosed millions on a cricket stadium, hotel, cinema and restaurant---the Sticky Wicket---on the grounds of the airport.

"I love this place and its people", says Mr. Stanford. That relationship deepened four years ago, he says, when he met a local Catholic priest with wounds in his hands and feet that he believed to be the stigmata of Jesus Christ. As a memento of that life-changing experience, Mr. Stanford carries with him a vial with the congealed fluids drained from the priest's foot.

Where most balk at lending to a bloated and revenue-strapped government with a record of mismanagement and corruption---it hasn't presented audited national accounts to its Parliament in a decade---Mr. Stanford has ponied up about $65 million. In short, says a recent editorial in Mr. Stanford's Antigua Sun, he is that unusual benefactor who has eschewed personal profit to boldly answer John F. Kennedy's famous call: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Mr. Stanford's detractors say the government of Prime Minister Lester Bird has become so indebted to Mr. Stanford over the past 12 years that it is only a matter of time before the two-island nation of 70,000 sees another, less altruistic side of the voluble Texan. "This man has a lien on our whole country," says government opposition party leader Baldwin Spencer.

Although he no longer spends much time in the U.S, Stanford and his firm remain vitally interested in the operations of the U.S. government, according to this 2006 Bloomberg article, and gave generously to two disgraced super heroes known as The Torch and The Hammer:

In the past six years, Stanford Financial and its employees have made more than $2 million in donations to U.S. political candidates and parties, according to the Federal Election Commission and congressional and Internal Revenue Service records. Stanford gives to both Democrats and Republicans. Among its top beneficiaries have been former Senator Robert Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat who left office in 2003 amid ethics allegations, and ... Tom DeLay of Texas, who is resigning from Congress next month after having been indicted in an election-fundraising case, and Bob Ney of Ohio, who's under investigation in the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Stanford Financial or its employees have contributed to the legal defense funds of the three lawmakers.

DeLay's committees paid for flights on Stanford's jets at least 16 times since 2003, including on Oct. 20, the day the former House majority leader was booked in a Houston courthouse on money-laundering charges ...

Members of the House Caribbean Caucus take annual trips to the region on Stanford's jets. Lawmakers are required to reimburse companies at a first-class commercial rate, which is often a fraction of the actual cost.

Then there’s the old school tie (NYT):

… Stanford has claimed ties to Leland Stanford, the former governor of California who started Stanford University in the 1800s. The university, however, has said there is no genealogical relationship between the two. (See Stanford Daily story)

Finally, we’d be remiss in not pointing out that despite his generosity toward noted global warming skeptic DeLay, Stanford is an environmentalist who, unlike you, has been getting his substantial shit together in advance of Doomsday (Forbes):

Stanford is a bit of a global-warming fanatic, trading information frequently with fellow warming-obsessive Ted Turner. His St. Croix house is built on a hill, the better, he jokes, to protect against rising waters from melting ice caps. Stanford has pledged $100 million for various environmental programs, including a marine sciences research institute in Antigua.

*(Bloomberg reported that Stanford International Bank Ltd., with $8.5 billion in assets and 30,000 clients, claimed returns on investment of between 10.3 and 15.1 percent every year from 1995 through 2008. And: "Stanford’s one-year, $100,000 CD paid 4.5 percent annual yield as of Nov. 28 ... A one-year, $10,000 CD purchased at JP Morgan Chase & Co. would earn 1.5 percent …" Apparently Stanford is not the kind of “bank” that lends money but instead “invests in a mix of equities, metals, currencies and derivatives,” although it claims its CDs are the same kind of instruments in which mopes like us park our money.