Photos: Jim Hightower\Wikimedia Commons
Years ago in Juarez, Mexico, I wandered into a carnival sideshow that flabbergasted this Texas country boy. Stumbling out, I murmured: “Now I’ve seen everything… and then some.” But now, decades later, I’ve been even more stupefied by the news that convicted Wall Street swindler Michael Milken has just opened his own bizarre freak show in Washington, DC.
Touted as a “tourist attraction,” his museum glorifies predatory capitalists (like him), hailing them as heroic American geniuses! The infamous junk-bond scammer grandiosely labels his monument the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. It’s located right across the street from the White House (though it’s rumored that even his buddy Trump considered Michael’s “Monument to Mammon” to be too explicitly obscene to attach it directly to the East Wing).
In a perverse bit of symbolism, the thing occupies the former headquarters of a bank that was forced to close 20 years ago because of a money-laundering scandal. How’s that for Karma? But, to gloss over such ugliness, Milken has gilded his legacy mausoleum with Trumpian gold. The rooms, draperies, furniture – and even a fake tree in the atrium – all gleam with gold leaf, emphasizing Milken’s credo that the goal of life is money… and the power to get it.
Educational exhibits include an interactive game on compound interest, as well as a display of Mike’s high school cheerleading uniform. Missing, though, is any mention of the full presidential pardon this avaricious criminal wrangled from Trump in 2020, letting the racketeer escape prison for stealing a billion dollars from people who trusted him.
Still, if you visit his Washington freak show, the gift shop offers a memento that sums up his life: A $22 Milken money clip.
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