Today, a little more about Cuba. In January, while on a US government-sanctioned trip to Cuba, Wrongo met and became friendly with an award-winning author who also teaches at a local college in Havana. He is not a member of the Cuban Communist Party. Yesterday, I sent him a congratulatory email. Here is his reply:
What a great day for the future of this country, thanks to everyone´s support. We are starting a new path and I hope the future is prominent for all who genuinely dreamt of this great opportunity. Personally I will keep up the fight to bring both countries even closer. We all deserve it.
He is representative of many of the people I met during the week in Cuba. Many struggle to put food on the table, many are entrepreneurial, holding down 2 and sometimes 3 private sector jobs. And all were optimistic about the future, despite most being cash-poor.
A diplomatic thaw is a hopeful opening for both countries. Time will tell if the governments can match the willingness of their people to create an atmosphere of peace and cooperation.
Wrongo was a freshman in college when JFK gave what some call the “scariest speech ever”. We were playing cards in a dorm room, using a bed for a table as Kennedy spoke. Everyone in that room was frightened, and subsequently, all were drafted, or volunteered for military service after graduation.
Here is a short reminiscence about the times and the reactions in Washington and the Kremlin in 1962:
To help celebrate the end of belligerence between our two countries, here is Phil Ochs with “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” from 1965. It was about Vietnam, but it works for our 55-year disagreement with Cuba as well:
Sample lyric: Now the labor leader’s screamin’ when they close the missile plants, United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore, Call it “Peace” or call it “Treason,” Call it “Love” or call it “Reason,” But I ain’t marchin’ any more,
Phil, we could really use your voice now. The fight isn’t over.
Today’s Wake-Up Call is for Congress and the president. Mr. Obama’s support of the “CRomnibus” year-end spending package showed how the next two years in Washington will play out, and it doesn’t bode well for anyone (you) who doesn’t employ a registered lobbyist.
You already know that the budget bill included a rollback of derivatives reform, and a nearly ten-fold increase in the donation limits for party committees. What may have been less obvious is that the bill cuts $60 million from the EPA and $346 million, about 3%, from the IRS. The IRS cuts tell wealthy earners that tax avoidance is safe, with little expectation of an audit.
The White House basically turned on its own party, accepting roll-backs of liberal priorities. It’s clear that this kind of legislative sausage-making will be the rule in 2015.
The White House never threatened a veto of the CRomnibus over these riders, and actually supported the bill. House Democrats complained of being “lobbied by the White House” on the legislation. This is sure to be a recurring policymaking feature of the next two years.
So this is the new normal on Capitol Hill. The precedent for making changes on headline issues by tucking rollbacks into must-protect or must-pass legislation has been set with the White House’s active cooperation.
In other words, there’s your proof that elections have consequences.
Here are a couple of wake-up tunes for Monday. First, in keeping with the prime directive (well, maybe it’s the sub-prime directive), that the banks can never fail again, here is the late Pete Seeger doing “The Banks are made of Marble”:
The song was written by Les Rice in 1948 or 1949. Rice was a farmer in Ulster County, NY. Seeger lived across the Hudson from him, and apparently they met on several occasions.
Our second tune is in keeping with the other prime directive of a holly, jolly season. Captain Picard does “Let it Snow”:
The US attempted to co-opt Cuba’s hip-hop scene to foment revolution: USAID tried to recruit underground rappers in Cuba to sow unrest against Raul Castro’s government. They failed. Compared to the CIA torture story, this is small potatoes, but still another example of how we can’t stay out of any country’s internal affairs. Because, freedom!
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that insider trading is ok as long as the person accused of insider trading didn’t know that the original tipper disclosed the information in return for personal gain. Guessing that you’ll never know.
Thirty years after the Bhopal chemical accident, the worst in history, the spill’s effects are hitting a new generation. Professional clean-up hasn’t happened and there are no signs that the environmental catastrophe will end.
Study supports the theory that all ‘men are idiots’. Well, it wasn’t a scientific study, but it looked at 318 Darwin Awards cases, of which 282 Darwin Awards went to males, and just 36 awards were given to females. Males made up 88.7% of Darwin Award winners.
Old news department: The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll says that 56% of Americans say the country’s economic and political systems stacked against them. Different result from the NYT survey last week.
Your thought for the week:
I had two options, to remain silent and then be killed. Or I could speak up, and then be killed. I chose to speak up. – Malala Yousafzai, from her Nobel Peace Prize speech
Today is the birthday of both of the Wrongologist’s parents, born on the same day in different years. Dad was 2 years younger than Mom, they were married for more than 50 years, and both died at 85. They were born during WWI, were teenagers during the depression, and thus missed out on the education that today, we think of as necessary to get ahead.
They lived through WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and through the greatest expansion of the middle class in our country’s history. They went from horse-drawn vehicles on the streets of Brooklyn to owning cars and consumer electronics. They were Republicans who voted for Dewey and saw Nixon resign.
Their world view was that hard work brought continuous economic improvement. They didn’t feel tied to one job − there was another one out there that paid better, that held greater responsibility, which would pay off your house, send your kids to college and provide for your retirement. They were the last of the majority stay-at-home mom generation. Dad never made more than $40k per year, but they saved enough to buy a waterfront home in Florida, and to live there until just before the time when their money ran out.
Fast forward to 2014, and people have little reason to be so optimistic. On Thursday, the NYT released a poll that found that only 64% said they still believed in the American dream, the lowest result in 20 years. The American Dream for depression-era adults was not about becoming rich, it was about being able to move upwards, to reach a greater level of prosperity, something that, from the 1950s through the 1970s, everyone believed was possible.
Now, that optimistic vision is dying for Americans like my mom and dad, and Washington doesn’t care.
Onward to music. Today we feature Tom Waits, 2011 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Those who have heard Waits’s work know that he’ll never have to cancel a concert due to laryngitis. We start with a tune that shows how Americans were fools for the advertising of the 1970s. That’s probably an eternal condition in America, one that reflects the continuing (and wildly successful) effort on the part of corporations to sell us shit we don’t really need. Here is “Step Right Up”:
The key lyric is a thought for the ages:
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away”
We close with “Jersey Girl”. Most people think that this song is by Bruce Springsteen, but it was written by Waits. He wrote it with is soon-to-be wife, Kathleen Brennan. This is a long video for a short tune. You can go to 3:51 where Waits says “this is for Kathleen” and just hear his version of the song, or you can listen from the beginning to his extended shtick with the audience:
We wake up this morning remembering that it is 34 years to the day since John Lennon was killed outside the Dakota in NYC.
The Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So Right lived in a loft in the Wall Street area in 1980 when Lennon was killed. That night, December 8, 1980, we were listening to Vin Scelsa on the (at the time) free-form radio station, WNEW-FM, when Vinny announced that Lennon had been shot. He later announced that John had died.
Why kill Lennon? Certainly he was not everyone’s cup of Earl Gray. The common view of The Beatles was that Paul was cute, Ringo was funny and George was cerebral. John was the thinker and renegade, clearly too edgy for some. Here is a Lennon song that was sung at our wedding just the year before:
John did more than write and sing music. He was an advocate against the Vietnam War and marched with people in protest on the streets of New York. Nixon tried to get him deported. But that didn’t work, although Mark David Chapman had a different plan for sending John away.
Eight Los Angeles police officers who shot at two women over 100 times will not lose their jobs. They won’t even be suspended. They’ll just get some additional training.
Thinking today about the fact that the New York grand jury did not indict NYPD’s Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner, who died gasping “I can’t breathe” while in the custody of police outside a Staten Island convenience store. Here, from the indispensable MuckRock, is a screen shot from NYPD’s use of force policy:
So today’s question is: Are we having the oft-promised national conversation? Is there a fundamental contempt for the law among the people empowered to enforce it? And have we gone beyond just needing a discussion? We already have policies which should have prevented what happened toAmadou Diallo from happening to Michael Brown or to Eric Garner.
Police officers kill too many black people, and then too often, face little or no accountability, particularly when there’s no video to show America what went down.
To help you meditate over the weekend, here is Randy Newman’s “Jolly Coppers on Parade”. His music is a counterpoint to the images. Call it irony, call it disrespect by demonstrators or by the police, call it whatever you need. Obviously not all cops are like the ones we’re seeing in this video, but we all know they are out there:
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke Wednesday onto the media about the matter, talking about his 16 year old biracial son Dante: (brackets by the Wrongologist)
This is profoundly personal to me…I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he [the president] said, ‘I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens.’ And I said to him, I did.
De Blasio went on to note that he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, “have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face.” More from de Blasio:
Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face. A good young man, law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong. And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him—as families have all over this city for decades—in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.
This has been going on for centuries, folks. Throwing both hands up in the air signals either “Don’t shoot” or simply despair for changing the way things are.
It’s impossible to tell the difference anymore.
Today’s Wake Up is for entrenched power in America.
Inequality and political polarization has progressed to the point that the “The Hunger Games” trilogy is being taken seriously as literature with an important message for our time.
Some protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, have adopted Katniss’s revolutionary slogan, “If we burn, you burn with us.” In Thailand, students flashing District 12’s three-fingered salute — a symbol of protest in the film — have recently been arrested. (The salute has apparently been outlawed since spring.) In a few short years, “The Hunger Games” and its symbology have become a part of the cultural commons.
America’s upper middle class thinks that inequality is an issue because it means low GDP growth, solely because people can’t buy enough consumer products to create good jobs. However, there could be an inflection point ahead when having more consumer goods ceases to be the goal of the middle class, or the people in poverty.
Look back at the French and Russian monarchies for a lesson about what that transition might look like, and how fast it can come about.
Today’s wake up music isn’t designed to get you dancing. It is the political anthem, “We Can’t Make It Here” by James McMurtry. McMurtry is the son of the novelist Larry McMurtry. The song won the 2005 Americana Music Award for song of the year. Music critic Robert Christgau has ranked “We Can’t Make It Here” as the best song of the 2000s. Bob Lefsetz said that “We Can’t Make It Here” has stood the test of time because of its unmitigated truth. Listen, while thinking that this was written in 2005, not this year:
Sample lyrics: Will I work for food, will I die for oil, Will kill for power and to us the spoils, The billionaires get to pay less tax, The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Monday’s Links:
Millennials are having to choose between affordable housing and jobs. It has always been true that there are fewer jobs where housing is affordable, but today, those two halves of the American Dream are living farther apart. Jobs with high wages are in unaffordable cities. The affordable homes cluster in the cities with lower wages and less upwardly mobile families.
Governor Christie (R-NJ) gives early sign that he is running for President. Christie vetoed a bill that would have banned crating pigs. New Jersey has few pig farms, but they are widespread in Iowa.
You can unknowingly lease a dog in San Diego CA. People who thought they purchased a dog using time payments actually leased the pet. After 27 months of payments, they could pay a $93.52 fee to end the lease, or $187.04 to purchase the pet. Why not just get a rescue animal? Read the paperwork, people! This is probably the next Wall Street securitization scheme.
When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything — but that is not so…
His point was that Catholics should believe in evolution and the big bang theory. Next, Kansas and Texas will probably try to excommunicate him. Clearly, he’s been confused by those science-y people.
There is a serious nuclear waste problem in the Arctic, brought to you by Russia. According to a joint Russian-Norwegian report issued in 2012, there are 17,000 containers of nuclear waste, 19 rusting Soviet nuclear ships and 14 nuclear reactors cut out of atomic vessels sitting on the bottom of the Kara Sea. The worst case scenario is described as “an Arctic underwater Chernobyl, played out in slow motion.” Oh, great, and I was worried about Crimea.
The NYT reported on Saturday that the Obama administration has changed the rules for American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. It means that our troops could have a more direct role in the fighting for at least another year. From the NYT:
Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops, or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described to the public earlier this year…
The new orders clarify the rules of engagement before US forces engage in combat. They can go after terrorist organizations; they can protect themselves, and they can come to the assistance of Afghan forces in need. This last rule has the potential to bog us down, despite the fact that troop levels are coming down to about 10,000.
Then, on Sunday, came this from the NYT under the headline: “Hour’s Drive Outside Kabul, Taliban Reign”. From the article:
…southern Kapisa Province has quietly become one of the greatest challenges of the war for the new government…In the absence of international troops or their air support, the Taliban have eclipsed the legitimacy of government forces there and in several other parts of the country… the insurgents…already control a crucial stretch of a highway leading into Kabul, and some local officials believe the militants are trying to carve a large area of Taliban rule across the lower two-thirds of the province.
Apparently, our generals have been lobbying Mr. Obama for a more aggressive posture on the ground, which explains the new rules of engagement.
Why is it so hard for us to quit Afghanistan? It was super easy to decide to go in there, and we seem to be bent on playing in that sandbox forever. We have failed once again to leave well (bad) enough alone.
But it was not just the generals and politicians who failed, it was the American people. We were astonishingly easy to corrupt. We can point to any number of contributing factors for that, overly emotional after 9/11, improper education about the Middle East, out-of-control capitalism, rapid social change − you name it, we looked the other way rather than think about consequences. Now, we are where we are, and none of us as individuals are in a position to do much of anything about it. But as a nation and as a people, we didn’t rise to the occasion.
And when was the last time the American people and their politicians actually “rose to the occasion”? Watergate? At least then both parties seemed to understand that a response was needed to the “mistake”. The Church Commission hearings and legislation on the CIA’s abuses? The Savings and Loan clean-up of the late 80s?
Let’s just say it’s been a while. Maybe it’s time we did again.
The question is whether we have any better understanding of what we are doing today. We seem to just recycle the same failed ME strategy. And it seems to be dictated more by the Congressional politics than by some informed sense of how to deal with the multiple threats we have in front of us.
On that happy note, here is today’s wake-up tune, “Sorry I Stole Your Man” by The Detroit-based Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas. They were on Letterman last week doing the same song, but the Wrongologist prefers this live version performed at the Magic Bag in July, 2012:
Some think she sounds like Amy Winehouse, but not the Wrongologist. Like their sound, and you can get up and dance to it.
Lower gas prices made gas stations more money: As gas stations cut the cost at the pump, they didn’t pass all of the savings along. The Labor Department reported that margins for fuel and lubricant retailers jumped by 26.1% in October, in a month when gasoline prices fell to an average of $3.12 a gallon from $3.46 in September.
Kill the robots: A vending machine that dispenses prescription drugs has been installed on Arizona State University’s campus, allowing any student or university employee to pick up their drugs from the dispenser.
RIP Mike Nichols. We remember you for films like: “The Graduate”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, “Silkwood”, “Catch-22”, and “Charlie Wilson’s War”.
Your thought for the week: (especially you Republicans)
“The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.” – Ben Franklin
This is the week in 1949 when Duane Allman was born. He died in 1971 in a motorcycle accident. He was best known as a founder of the Allman Brothers Band, but before he was an Allman Brother, Duane was a session musician at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals Alabama. While working there in 1968, he met Wilson Pickett and suggested that he cover “Hey Jude”, then starting up the charts for the Beatles. Pickett didn’t like the idea, neither did the owner of Fame, the great Rick Hall. But, Allman convinced both of them to record “Hey Jude“:
Many people cover the Beatles. The fact that so many can “take a sad song & make it better” only goes to show the songwriting ability of the lads from Liverpool. This brings us to “The Art of McCartney”, released this week, with a huge group of artists covering McCartney songs. Until a few days ago, you could stream the entire album, but now there are just a few official videos that are up on YouTube.
While covers can be great, they mostly disappoint the Wrongologist. Performers are often too self-conscious (or in less-than-great voice) to really deliver the goods on someone else’s great song. So, instead of more covers, let’s close with a live performance of McCartney and Bruce Springsteen in Hyde Park in London in 2012 doing “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout”.
This delivers the goods. It is about 9:40, so settle in:
Today’s Monday Wake Up is for the Democratic Party. Trevor LaFauci at The People’s View compared Democrats to a bad first date:
They’re like a bad first date: They know what they want to say, they know they have a lot going for them but when it comes time to talk about themselves they do it meekly and awkwardly, so much so that the other person just assumes this person doesn’t have a lot going for them.
What’s worse is the Democrats try hard not to suck at funds-raising. The Wrongologist’s in-box is crammed with pleas by Democrats for more money, even after the Tuesday That Shall Not Be Named disaster.
I Need You. Three magic words. They light up our brain, they grab our attention, and they initiate action. But they’re being corrupted by the ease of reach and the desire by some organizations to grow at all costs… Political fundraisers have turned this from an art to a science to an endless whine.
A loyal reader of the Wrongologist, David Price, replied to an email plea for more money from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, saying that more money wasn’t the answer for Democrats:
Running away from the progressive agenda may have seemed like smart politics, but it turned out to (1) make once attractive candidates look like phonies, (2) make our party seem apologetic for its accomplishments and ashamed of its ambitions, (3) demoralize those progressives who have traditionally identified the Democratic Party as the most effective vehicle for their hopes and (4) arguably have been bad politics after all, even in the shortest-run, most pragmatic, down-and-dirty sense.
More from Trevor LaFauci:
And so Democrats, the choice is yours: You can cater to the centrist, middle-of-the-road, kinda-sorta progressive voters in your party or you can go all in on issues that the American people actually care about…If you go middle of the road, know that you’re putting the millennial vote in play, especially for a generation that, for the most part, remains politically independent.
If Democrats can’t choose, then the 2016 presidential election is in play for anyone who appeals to independent voters. That could be how we end up with President Romney, or President Rand Paul.
It’s time for the Democratic Party to wake up. To help them, a song by the late Gary Moore, a great Irish guitarist and former member of Thin Lizzy who is barely known in the US. Here is “Still Got The Blues”:
Using a DOJ program called Equitable Sharing, state and local forfeiture restrictions are lifted when the DOJ gets a cut. The practice of seizing a person’s money or property without accusing them of a crime is called civil forfeiture. Some states have tough restrictions on what forfeiture proceeds can be used for, some are very liberal. Agencies enrolled in the Equitable Sharing program can petition a DOJ agency to “adopt” their seizure. In an adoptive seizure, they get to keep 80% of the profits to use for any purpose, while the DOJ takes the rest.
Certain older drugs, many of which are generic and not protected by patents or market exclusivity, are becoming extremely expensive.
Plenty of people consider YouTube the best music site on the Web. It is featured here on most Fridays.
Yesterday, the NYT reported that YouTube unveiled YouTube Music Key, a fee-based service that will include higher-quality audio for most songs and the option of paying $8 a month for extra features, chief among them removing YouTube’s ubiquitous ads. The Wrongologist has no strong objection to paying for YouTube, as long as they don’t mess up what they already have. So here is a wish for MUSIC KEY: Please don’t screw YouTube up. That’s not asking too much, is it?
Yesterday was also Neil Percival Young’s 69th birthday. Young is an artist who has always been blatantly political, from “Ohio (Four Dead in Ohio)” recorded in 1970, to “Who’s Gonna Stand Up (and Save the Earth)” published last month.
The key to any Neil Young music is the reedy high tenor and the hammering guitar. When you can get those two with politics, so much the better. Here is his “Rockin’ In the Free World” from 1989:
“Rockin in the Free World” was written to criticize the George Bush I presidency. It is regularly covered by Pearl Jam, often in their encores. It hit #2 on the US rock charts in 1990.
Finally, “Hey, Hey, My, My”, from his “Rust Never Sleeps” album, recorded in 1991. The line from the song, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” became infamous after it was quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. Young later dedicated his 1994 album “Sleeps with Angels” to Cobain. Here is “Hey, Hey, My My“:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O1v_7T6p8U
In total, NY has 40 albums. If and/or when the Great Pumpkin welcomes Wrongo to Pearly Gates and asks: “Out of all the recording artists who ever lived, who did you listen to the most throughout every decade of your life?”
