Hi. There’s been a lot of talk about you lately. President Obama has decided that you’re being paid too much, and he is – or members of his administration, at least, are – cutting your pay. It may be up to 90%. And the scary part, from your perspective at least, is that most people seem to be all for it. Even people who are against it for moral/political reasons think you deserve it.
You may count me among them. The one thing that I think will make it stick is that it’s going to happen to rich guys whose companies took stimulus money. That gives the lender some say in things like that, like it or not. They can do it to Chrysler, but they can’t do it to Ford.
Your stockholders should have already done it, but they dropped the ball just like they did when they hired you to lead the company. If you’d done a job worthy of a big bonus, they wouldn’t be in the trouble they’re in now. I have no sympathy for you whatsoever. Consider yourself lucky that you have a job.
Why is this attitude so pervasive in American society? I’ll tell you, simply and succinctly; it’s because you’re an asshole. Think about that next time you go out to a restaurant, or the grocery store, or get gas for your BMW. Listen to the words that come out of your mouth to the people who serve you, get you things, hand you your change, ask you for more detail regarding what you want, and then smile and say, "Thank you, have a nice day."
Day after day I have had you and people like you look me in the eye and call me stupid, or say something that shows you think I’m stupid, in spite of my education and experience. I know my job, and I hope I’m not guilty of sinful pride when I say I’m pretty darned good at it. When you come up and spout gibberish and I don’t leap into action, it’s your fault. Your explanation of what you want makes no sense to me. When I come back with questions that you have to actually think about, it’s because I want to give you what you want and I’m trying to figure out what that is. Coming back with the same gibberish, only louder, does not expedite the process.
You seem to forget that you need us, and we don’t need you. You ought to carry that thought around for a while. Your ability to be an asshole with no negative repercussions relates directly to the amount of money you have, and nothing more. You don’t seem to realize that your attitude toward the people that feed you, clothe you, and get you things to amuse you is reprehensible. Try to imagine what your life would be like if you woke up one morning and your bank account was empty. Your job was gone. The things you own are being repossessed. By 10 in the morning, you’re standing beside the road with the clothes on your back. And the rest of us are going about our business with no more cares than the night before. We don’t need you.
We grow the food. We pick it. We transport it to places where people will buy it. We build the store it’s sold in, and the truck that brought it. We clear the land it’s built on. And if you and your kind were to vanish tomorrow morning, we’d manage without you. We were growing, traveling, and building long before there were any banks or corporations.
But what about you? If we were all to disappear, who would bring you your latte? Who would make it? Who would harvest the coffee beans and milk the cow? Who would feed the cow?
None of us, really, doubt that you work hard. Or that you serve a useful purpose in society. We all have bank accounts, and take out loans, and we like the fact that if we buy a Chevy in Idaho we can easily get parts for it in Georgia. It’s people like you, managing these large organizations and their interaction, that make these things possible. You make and distribute the movies and music and TV shows we enjoy. You excel at the games we’ve invented, and it’s entertaining to watch you do it. We take significant amounts of our income and freely spend them to enjoy the fruits of your labors, and don’t begrudge you a dime as long as we get what we’re paying for. After all, we’ve got families to feed and bills to pay, and we hate getting ripped off as much as you do.
So when you come into the places we work so hard in and act like we’re ripping YOU off, we don’t like it. We’re not, usually, and your contempt is unjustified. You should behave better, and you should certainly teach your kids to. Have you ever seen them in line for food at a ski area? Have you heard the things they say to the people providing them sustenance? If my kids behaved that way, I’d discipline them.
Or do you even know your kids? Do you spend time with them, or do you shunt them off to schools and then in the summer shunt them off to camps? Do you send them postcards from the places you go, with two gushy sentences about how much you love them, while they deal with surrogate parents paid to amuse them for a month or two? Is that how you were raised? No wonder you’re an asshole.
Why not consider this; you’re in a Dunkin’ Donuts, or a Post Office, or a Mercedes-Benz dealership, or the place you store your boat, or a lift line at Loon Mountain. You need something. You come to a person who makes his living by getting you breakfast, or shipping your package, or making sure you don’t break your neck getting on the chair lift. Already, today, that person has served dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other people successfully. They’ve been doing it for a while, and they’re probably going to be doing it for a while longer. Maybe years. Maybe for life.
Try this; be nice. Smile at them. Thank them. Act, for two seconds, as if you appreciate their efforts, and maybe even care about them. Wish them well. Yeah, I know, you don’t care, but try and appear like you do. Just for two seconds. Believe me, they will remember you. They will mention it to others. It will give them a lift. It will even make them want to do their jobs better. And if it doesn’t appear to do that, it’s because so many people like you have been so harsh to them for so long, they’ve tuned it all out. So do it again. Don’t be pushy, just be nice. Keep it up, and it will eventually rehumanize them.
And, just maybe, it will rehumanize you, too.
And as for your pay, just suck it up. Those of us who make your life possible and get low to mid five figures for doing it would trade with you in a heartbeat.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
A Few Thoughts on Health Care Reform
>sigh<
Okay, I can’t resist. Here goes.
Two big problems with the health care system in this country. 1) It’s expensive. 2) Not everybody has access to it.
1) Expensive
Watched my retired parents deal with the first problem. Medicine is expensive, and so are doctors. On the surface, it appears that putting both under control of the federal government completely solves the problem. The government sets the price. Every doctor and nurse in the country is now a federal employee, and Uncle Sam now owns the pharmaceutical companies.
1a) Expensive: Postal solution
We’re still on problem one, right? Expensive? Okay, there’s two ways to deal with that. Always two ways. >sigh< One is to make the health care system like the Postal System, my current employer. I’ve been with the company for 21 years, and have had a good close-up view of how it works from the inside.
The US Postal System is going through a very rough patch right now, as with the downturn in the economy and changes in the way people do things, we’re losing a ton of money. There is pressure from every side on this company right now. Our customers want us to keep our prices down and continue to provide the same service as before, or better. Each post office is under pressure from management to increase revenue and reduce costs.
There are some things that the USPS could do that would help, but we can’t get them done. For instance, we could close a bunch of small, unprofitable post offices that one could argue aren’t needed because they’re close to bigger, more profitable ones. But they’ve been there for a hundred years, and their handful of customers complain to their representatives in Congress and Congress says no, you can’t close them. Or, we could consolidate certain parts of the company and let employees go, but they’re represented by Unions, which complain to the politicians, and no, you can’t let them go.
So let’s say instead of a local Postmaster, I’m now the local Healthmaster, running a small clinic in a small town. The people in the town wish I was better equipped and staffed, because I can’t do things like appendectomies or other surgical procedures. The US Health System won’t give me the money I would need to have an operating room and keep a surgeon on staff, because there aren’t enough people in my area to pay for it. He’d be playing solitaire all day because there’d only be two or three surgeries to perform every week, and the OR would collect dust. As would the surgeon’s skills.
So I get promoted, and instead of running a level 13 clinic I now run a level 18 hospital in a larger town. They’ve got OR’s and surgeons, but they work like slaves because all these people from the small outlying towns have to come here to get anything besides Band-Aids and flu shots. And word just came down the pipeline from HQ that the cost-of-living increases we were expecting have been postponed for another two years because the economy’s taken a bad turn and an election year’s coming up.
That pipeline, which comes from District Management, says that I have to trim my expenses, because more budget cuts are on the way. Oh, and there’s been more complaints that people in my area are being told they have to wait because there’s a line ahead of them waiting to see their doctor, and can we speed things up a little bit? And no, you can’t have more doctors because you’re not budgeted for them and besides it’s harder to get them because no one wants to go to medical school any more because the local mailman makes more than a doctor these days.
1b) Expensive: the Military Option
The military is a former employee of mine, so I’ve got a little insight into its workings as well. In my case, the US Navy. The other way to manage a federal health care system would be to do it like that. Hand it a blank check and give it anything it needs. So now I’m no longer the local Healthmaster, I’m Major Clogston, Commanding Officer of the local clinic.
Sitting here thinking about it, there’s a lot to be said for this method. The Captain of an aircraft carrier doesn’t think about the price of gas when planes are shooting down the flight deck, burning enough jet fuel to light Seattle. Neither does the commander of that tank brigade. People complain about the Pentagon’s budget, but by gosh when you need them you’re glad you’ve got the best.
But the US Health Corps’ budget would dwarf the Pentagon’s. The US Armed Forces together have about 210,000 active duty officers. There are approximately 1.5 million physicians in the United States. And then there’s all the nurses, and paramedics, and EMTs, and janitors, and office staff, and kitchen help, and pharmacists, just like the Army has enlisted men.
But the blank-check caution-to-the-wind method is the only way you’ll get doctors and pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies to continue to develop and produce at the levels they do now. Let’s face facts; countries that have single-payer health care systems come to us for drugs and medical equipment, and their doctors come here to work because they can make money. If you have figures that show otherwise, please put them in the comments sections of this blog.
And if you’re thinking that the military option is actually good, then I need to tell you something. When I was in the Navy, the striking thing that I will always remember about it was how much got stolen. We would have a working party unloading a truck full of food, and by the end of the day I would estimate a good third of it walked back off the ship, or went into somebody’s locker. And that happened with everything. Need a pair of pliers? A new toilet seat for your home? You name it, the base or ship or whatever has got piles of them lying around.
In my observation, I would guess that the people who work there steal a good portion of our military budget. The same thing would happen to a government-run health care system.
2) Access
I’m totally tired of all the hyperbole over how many people don’t have health insurance. If you show up at an emergency room, they have to take care of you. It’s the law. Then they send you a bill. That’s business. But you still get waited on, whether or not you ever pay it. I think everyone who thinks that health care should be free should immediately apply for medical school.
I agree with the people who say, whatever insurance system Congress and the President come up with should apply to them as well.
I would have less of a problem with what they call the public option if it were administered by the states instead of the federal government. There are a lot of advantages to state-level government programs, as I have discussed in other articles on this blog. Read them.
This brings us to Medicaid. Yes, there’s a lot about it that’s broken. So fix it! Here’s a link to a good article about Medicaid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
You improve Medicaid, you’ve solved the access problem.
3) Bullshit
That’s the biggest problem with the whole debate. There’s so much being said about reform that you can’t actually find out what the facts are. There’s 1100 or so pages of legislation floating around that nobody gets to see, or apparently can understand. Who writes this stuff?
Here’s an FYI fer ya. An insurance company is not a health care provider. It is an investment firm. Most of their profits come not from the premiums their customers pay, but from the investments they make with them. It’s like a bank. They don’t pay their staff and their light bill out of the deposits. Hell, they pay interest to the depositors! Then they invest the money on deposit.
But the government does not invest the money it gets from taxpayers. Whatever money the government pays to doctors and hospitals, it has to get it all from us. The next time a politician says they can do public option health insurance without increasing the deficit, you will know what a liar looks like.
And both sides are guilty. The people who owe their livelihoods to the current system are pulling out all the stops to fight the President’s reforms. Nothing breaks the back of a family’s finances quicker than a health issue. Have a heart attack, or get cancer, and you’re poor. There actually is an outcry for reform.
Unfortunately, the reforms being offered are all politically motivated. Special interest groups like insurance companies, AARP, drug companies and such are driving the debate for their own benefit. Left-leaning ideologues are trying to wrestle control away from corporations, but without thinking through what will happen when they do. They talk about tearing down an edifice of greed, but that same edifice serves millions of people. What will they replace it with?
The basis of what I’m trying to say is this; let’s not break the parts that work. You’ve got a better idea for a health care system? Fine. Start a company and sell subscriptions to it. Compete with the current options in the public market place. My suggestion for the government is to revamp and upgrade Medicaid. You come up with a way to have cheap doctors and drugs with no loss in quality, sign me up.
And for that matter, taking better care of yourself will go a long way in that department.
I’ll shut up now.
Okay, I can’t resist. Here goes.
Two big problems with the health care system in this country. 1) It’s expensive. 2) Not everybody has access to it.
1) Expensive
Watched my retired parents deal with the first problem. Medicine is expensive, and so are doctors. On the surface, it appears that putting both under control of the federal government completely solves the problem. The government sets the price. Every doctor and nurse in the country is now a federal employee, and Uncle Sam now owns the pharmaceutical companies.
1a) Expensive: Postal solution
We’re still on problem one, right? Expensive? Okay, there’s two ways to deal with that. Always two ways. >sigh< One is to make the health care system like the Postal System, my current employer. I’ve been with the company for 21 years, and have had a good close-up view of how it works from the inside.
The US Postal System is going through a very rough patch right now, as with the downturn in the economy and changes in the way people do things, we’re losing a ton of money. There is pressure from every side on this company right now. Our customers want us to keep our prices down and continue to provide the same service as before, or better. Each post office is under pressure from management to increase revenue and reduce costs.
There are some things that the USPS could do that would help, but we can’t get them done. For instance, we could close a bunch of small, unprofitable post offices that one could argue aren’t needed because they’re close to bigger, more profitable ones. But they’ve been there for a hundred years, and their handful of customers complain to their representatives in Congress and Congress says no, you can’t close them. Or, we could consolidate certain parts of the company and let employees go, but they’re represented by Unions, which complain to the politicians, and no, you can’t let them go.
So let’s say instead of a local Postmaster, I’m now the local Healthmaster, running a small clinic in a small town. The people in the town wish I was better equipped and staffed, because I can’t do things like appendectomies or other surgical procedures. The US Health System won’t give me the money I would need to have an operating room and keep a surgeon on staff, because there aren’t enough people in my area to pay for it. He’d be playing solitaire all day because there’d only be two or three surgeries to perform every week, and the OR would collect dust. As would the surgeon’s skills.
So I get promoted, and instead of running a level 13 clinic I now run a level 18 hospital in a larger town. They’ve got OR’s and surgeons, but they work like slaves because all these people from the small outlying towns have to come here to get anything besides Band-Aids and flu shots. And word just came down the pipeline from HQ that the cost-of-living increases we were expecting have been postponed for another two years because the economy’s taken a bad turn and an election year’s coming up.
That pipeline, which comes from District Management, says that I have to trim my expenses, because more budget cuts are on the way. Oh, and there’s been more complaints that people in my area are being told they have to wait because there’s a line ahead of them waiting to see their doctor, and can we speed things up a little bit? And no, you can’t have more doctors because you’re not budgeted for them and besides it’s harder to get them because no one wants to go to medical school any more because the local mailman makes more than a doctor these days.
1b) Expensive: the Military Option
The military is a former employee of mine, so I’ve got a little insight into its workings as well. In my case, the US Navy. The other way to manage a federal health care system would be to do it like that. Hand it a blank check and give it anything it needs. So now I’m no longer the local Healthmaster, I’m Major Clogston, Commanding Officer of the local clinic.
Sitting here thinking about it, there’s a lot to be said for this method. The Captain of an aircraft carrier doesn’t think about the price of gas when planes are shooting down the flight deck, burning enough jet fuel to light Seattle. Neither does the commander of that tank brigade. People complain about the Pentagon’s budget, but by gosh when you need them you’re glad you’ve got the best.
But the US Health Corps’ budget would dwarf the Pentagon’s. The US Armed Forces together have about 210,000 active duty officers. There are approximately 1.5 million physicians in the United States. And then there’s all the nurses, and paramedics, and EMTs, and janitors, and office staff, and kitchen help, and pharmacists, just like the Army has enlisted men.
But the blank-check caution-to-the-wind method is the only way you’ll get doctors and pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies to continue to develop and produce at the levels they do now. Let’s face facts; countries that have single-payer health care systems come to us for drugs and medical equipment, and their doctors come here to work because they can make money. If you have figures that show otherwise, please put them in the comments sections of this blog.
And if you’re thinking that the military option is actually good, then I need to tell you something. When I was in the Navy, the striking thing that I will always remember about it was how much got stolen. We would have a working party unloading a truck full of food, and by the end of the day I would estimate a good third of it walked back off the ship, or went into somebody’s locker. And that happened with everything. Need a pair of pliers? A new toilet seat for your home? You name it, the base or ship or whatever has got piles of them lying around.
In my observation, I would guess that the people who work there steal a good portion of our military budget. The same thing would happen to a government-run health care system.
2) Access
I’m totally tired of all the hyperbole over how many people don’t have health insurance. If you show up at an emergency room, they have to take care of you. It’s the law. Then they send you a bill. That’s business. But you still get waited on, whether or not you ever pay it. I think everyone who thinks that health care should be free should immediately apply for medical school.
I agree with the people who say, whatever insurance system Congress and the President come up with should apply to them as well.
I would have less of a problem with what they call the public option if it were administered by the states instead of the federal government. There are a lot of advantages to state-level government programs, as I have discussed in other articles on this blog. Read them.
This brings us to Medicaid. Yes, there’s a lot about it that’s broken. So fix it! Here’s a link to a good article about Medicaid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
You improve Medicaid, you’ve solved the access problem.
3) Bullshit
That’s the biggest problem with the whole debate. There’s so much being said about reform that you can’t actually find out what the facts are. There’s 1100 or so pages of legislation floating around that nobody gets to see, or apparently can understand. Who writes this stuff?
Here’s an FYI fer ya. An insurance company is not a health care provider. It is an investment firm. Most of their profits come not from the premiums their customers pay, but from the investments they make with them. It’s like a bank. They don’t pay their staff and their light bill out of the deposits. Hell, they pay interest to the depositors! Then they invest the money on deposit.
But the government does not invest the money it gets from taxpayers. Whatever money the government pays to doctors and hospitals, it has to get it all from us. The next time a politician says they can do public option health insurance without increasing the deficit, you will know what a liar looks like.
And both sides are guilty. The people who owe their livelihoods to the current system are pulling out all the stops to fight the President’s reforms. Nothing breaks the back of a family’s finances quicker than a health issue. Have a heart attack, or get cancer, and you’re poor. There actually is an outcry for reform.
Unfortunately, the reforms being offered are all politically motivated. Special interest groups like insurance companies, AARP, drug companies and such are driving the debate for their own benefit. Left-leaning ideologues are trying to wrestle control away from corporations, but without thinking through what will happen when they do. They talk about tearing down an edifice of greed, but that same edifice serves millions of people. What will they replace it with?
The basis of what I’m trying to say is this; let’s not break the parts that work. You’ve got a better idea for a health care system? Fine. Start a company and sell subscriptions to it. Compete with the current options in the public market place. My suggestion for the government is to revamp and upgrade Medicaid. You come up with a way to have cheap doctors and drugs with no loss in quality, sign me up.
And for that matter, taking better care of yourself will go a long way in that department.
I’ll shut up now.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Matt Smart
I had the privilege of seeing the latest evolution of one of the finest musicians in New England the other night. It was at a benefit party/concert at King's Lumber's airfield in Wentworth, NH. Bob King and his partner, whose name I've sadly forgotten, played, and then me, and it finished up with Matt Smart's band. Bob and his friend were very good, and the audience was very kind to me, thank you very much. The benefit was for the Warren/Wentworth Ambulance Service.
The first time I met Matt he was about 19 and already sounded like Stevie Ray Vaughn. I don't mean just played the notes, I mean he did it with real soul. That was probably ten years ago, and he's done nothing but improve since.
He hung around with me and the band I was in for a while, back when Chris Sweeney and I were playing as The Flexibles. He liked the variety of music we did, but he's always been primarily a modern blues man. Last night I saw a more mature artist, but one who is still stretching out. He's left the SRV clone behind and is working more from a modern Southern Rock stance, channelling Duane Allman and Steve Gaines from latter Skynyrd.
He started the night on a Les Paul, but quickly switched to a Telecaster, which he's clearly more comfortable with. He's also taken the step of being this band's lead singer, and he's not bad. Al Boucher played great drums, and I believe the bass player's name was Fish, and he was very good as well. Plus, Bob King joined them on second guitar, but I don't think he's a regular member of the group.
As far as rock guitar goes, the only serious competition to Matt is Mike Bottigio of Cobalt Blue, and Mike's got about twenty years on Matt. Mike is simply incredible; a Hendrix disciple but with his own distinct voice. That is something that Matt doesn't have quite yet, but it's coming. He's an incredible player, but he hasn't hit that Carlos Santana/Phil Keaggy identifiability yet.
And yes, I know there are guitarists out there who have a lot more technique than Matt, Mike, or any other rock and roller. But if rock and roll is your music, these are the guys that everyone else in New England has to answer to. And dat's de name o' dat tune.
The first time I met Matt he was about 19 and already sounded like Stevie Ray Vaughn. I don't mean just played the notes, I mean he did it with real soul. That was probably ten years ago, and he's done nothing but improve since.
He hung around with me and the band I was in for a while, back when Chris Sweeney and I were playing as The Flexibles. He liked the variety of music we did, but he's always been primarily a modern blues man. Last night I saw a more mature artist, but one who is still stretching out. He's left the SRV clone behind and is working more from a modern Southern Rock stance, channelling Duane Allman and Steve Gaines from latter Skynyrd.
He started the night on a Les Paul, but quickly switched to a Telecaster, which he's clearly more comfortable with. He's also taken the step of being this band's lead singer, and he's not bad. Al Boucher played great drums, and I believe the bass player's name was Fish, and he was very good as well. Plus, Bob King joined them on second guitar, but I don't think he's a regular member of the group.
As far as rock guitar goes, the only serious competition to Matt is Mike Bottigio of Cobalt Blue, and Mike's got about twenty years on Matt. Mike is simply incredible; a Hendrix disciple but with his own distinct voice. That is something that Matt doesn't have quite yet, but it's coming. He's an incredible player, but he hasn't hit that Carlos Santana/Phil Keaggy identifiability yet.
And yes, I know there are guitarists out there who have a lot more technique than Matt, Mike, or any other rock and roller. But if rock and roll is your music, these are the guys that everyone else in New England has to answer to. And dat's de name o' dat tune.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Filling Out Forms
There are many musical forms, although you might not be aware of that if your knowledge is limited to modern popular music. Oh, yeah, all kinds of forms.
The basic song form that is commonly used now is pretty flexible, which is probably why it’s so popular. You start out with a piece of a song. A verse, a chorus, maybe four lines, maybe eight, however it comes together. Aerosmith’s regular formula is to start with a chorus. Steven Tyler says that if you’ve got a good hook, you can write a song around it. It’s the same method that Merle Travis, the great Country picker, liked to use. He would take one line and write the chorus backward from that line, making it the final one. Then he came up with verses that led to that chorus.
AC-DC has simplified the process even more. Since the death of Bon Scott, the standard AC-DC song takes the title and repeats it four times. There’s your chorus. Some of Bon’s tunes used to be a little more free form, but the Brian Johnson era has been their most successful by a long ways.
There are four basic elements of music; melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Those are all part of even a line from a song. You put together a group of lines, you have a verse or whatever. What you do with the lines, and the groups of lines, becomes the form.
Let’s say you’ve got a verse. Let’s write one, right now, all right?
Oh, baby
I love you
‘Deed I do
Really do
Whew! Look out, Lennon and McCartney! All right, there’s a verse. Let’s call that A. I don’t know what music you hear in your head for that, but let’s say it’s sixteen bars long. In the key of C, so the piano players can do it without any black keys. So it’s four bars of C, four bars of F, four of G, and back to C for the final four. Now, let’s do a second verse.
Oh, honey
Glad you’re mine
All the time
Dipped in slime.
We’re in a hurry, here. Same chord progression. Now we haven’t discussed a melody, tempo, instrumentation, or any of that. We have the basic rhythmic structure and the harmony, and that’s it. But that’s enough to show how a basic song is written. So we have pattern A, then we repeat it. A A. Now we need a chorus.
Baby honey mine
Guess that makes me yours
Gee, that’s really fine
Going? Shut the doors.
Keeping up? Okay then. Change the chord progression around a bit. Two bars of F, four of C, two of G, and repeat. That keeps it the same length as the verse, although it’s not necessary. But an important factor is that it ends on the V (five) chord, which leads back into the next verse. Oh, yes, there’s another verse. So let’s call this chorus the B section.
Right now, we have three parts to our song; A, A, B. Oh, all right, let’s just repeat the first verse and stick it at the end. Some great songs were done that way. Check out your hymnbook next time you’re at church. Of course, the sky’s the limit. We could do a lot more. Chorus again, then another verse, or write a third section and have that be the bridge. That would be C.
Let’s take a quick look at a popular, highly regarded song; Hey Jude, by the Beatles. It’s laid out like this:
Verse
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge, which is that na-na-na-nananana part.
Or, A A B A B C.
This is basically how songs get written. Sometimes it’s that mathematical, by people who know how it’s done. Sometimes it’s practically by accident, by people who get lucky. The standard song form is so ubiquitous now, it’s pretty easy for even an unschooled amateur to at least know if he’s done it right.
Let me give you an example. You’ve given a kid a ream of paper and told them they can draw anything they like. Sky’s the limit. So they grab a pencil and begin. They start off with pictures of family, pets, things they know. They put away the pencil and get crayons, colored pencils, water colors, oil paints, pastels, and so on. They move on to pictures from their imaginations, which could be things that don’t even exist or have any conscious meaning.
You would think that this kind of freedom, with this much access to materials, that the kid would be able to reach to the heights of artistic accomplishment. And yet, when you gather the pictures all together, you suddenly realize that they’re all 8 ½ by 11 inches and have a white background. All 500 of them.
It’s kind of like listening to the radio. Song after song, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, one after the other. Switch from classic rock to country to easy listening to alternative and on and on. Different styles, themes, sounds, but in basic ways all the same; all 2 to 4 minutes long, constructed from verses, choruses, and bridges.
This century has been an interesting one from a musical standpoint. On the one hand, every time you turn around there are different sounds available and they’re put together in different combinations. An orchestra of instruments has been divided, recompiled, reconfigured and added to with yet whole new orchestras of instruments. To the strings, horns, and percussions of old were added electronic synthesizers and differing systems of amplification and recording, as well as effect treatments.
And yet for all this experimentation with tone and timbre, with rhythm, harmony, and melody, the basic form of composition has settled into what can only be called a deep rut. A perfect example of this is the band "Primus," which has certainly stretched the sonic boundaries of what can be done with guitar, bass, and drums. And yet, most of their pieces are still verse, chorus, and maybe bridge constructions of three to five minutes.
It’s like having a fenced-in yard in which you keep a dog. The dog changes shape until it’s a caribou, a tiger, a gerbil, or a sperm whale, and yet the size of the yard never changes. And it still can’t break free. So now that you’ve seen the fence, here are some listening recommendations that might help you find a way out of the confines of 20th-century song form.
U2
These guys hit popular music back in 1980 as if they just stepped off the mothership from another world. They wrote and played like they were just inventing music themselves. Drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. was the only trained musician in the group, and none of them knew how to write songs. They used this to their advantage and simply did what sounded best to them. I think it’s telling that Bono, upon accepting the Grammy award for Song of the Year for "Beautiful Day" laughed because the song had no hook. Check out their first album, "Boy," or middle period stuff like "Unforgettable Fire" and "Joshua Tree."
Frank Zappa
I could make a long list of rock songwriters who play around outside the norm, but nobody did it better than Frank. He considered himself more jazz than rock, and jazz has never really been comfortable claiming him either. He was actually more of a disciple of avant-garde composers like Edgar Varese and Aaron Schoenburg than any popular songwriters. The difference between Frank and his inspirations was that Varese, Schoenburg and their ilk made music that is all but unlistenable. They had to explain the intellectual basis for their music to get anyone to listen to it. Zappa, on the other hand, took the same intellectual groundings and made exciting, interesting, and sometimes even danceable records with it. His crude sense of humor was what tended to attract people’s attention, but the music was incredible. He made over fifty albums, and just about all of them are amazing, but some are rather difficult to stomach unless you’re really into toilet humor. I recommend "One Size Fits All," "Roxy and Elsewhere," "Freak Out," and "The Yellow Shark" for starters.
Progressive Rock
In the seventies there were a lot of bands that added synths and maybe a violin or a flute to standard rock and roll and called it progressive. Then, there were the real ones that rose above the pretenders. Groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Hawkwind, Nektar, Gentle Giant, and on and on. Extended composition was the order of the day, and album-length compositions were the coin of the realm. Plus, people came out of these bands after they broke up and stretched even further, usually in obscurity but the stuff is out there. Here are some of my favorite mind-stretchers:
Yes – "Close to the Edge"
ELP – "Tarkus"
Genesis – "Foxtrot"
Gentle Giant – "Power and the Glory"
Todd Rundgren – "Utopia"
Jethro Tull – "Thick as a Brick"
That’ll keep you busy for a while.
Jam Bands
As much as I dislike the Grateful Dead and Phish, the movement that grew in their wake has some pretty cool stuff. As a young songwriter, I was captivated by the notion that music moved in a linear fashion, but visual art like painting and sculpture was outside the boundaries of time. I contemplated the idea of music that could exist outside these boundaries. Then one day I realized that jam bands did this all the time. A good jam tune really had no beginning or end, just an endlessly revolving middle. Recordings do not really do this music justice, but even so I would direct you toward the work of Duane-era Allman Brothers like "Eat a Peach" and "Live at the Fillmore" for this genre at its best. Most good jam bands occupy a loosely-knot left field between country and blues. Just google "Bonaroo" for good links.
Jazz
That’s an awfully big area to cover. For our purposes today, look to Duke Ellington, especially "The Great London Concert" and his later bebop-influenced stuff. Also Miles Davis, who never stayed in one place too long. There’s also modern Free Jazz to consider. One particular album I would recommend for its sonic bravery is one from 1973 by guitarist John Abercrombie and keyboardist Jan Hammer, called "Timeless." It’s named that because they shied away from even using time signatures. Just about anywhere you go in Jazz, you’re going to find something interesting. Jazz was, and should still be, about breaking boundaries.
Classical
This is where the boundaries came from in the first place, in Western music anyway. The chromatic scale and the written language of music came from here. You would be hard pressed to find modern standard song form here at all! The deeper you get into the classics, the more inspiration there is to find. And many of these ideas have not even been scratched for use by a rock band. Just think of it; a whole palette of idea, just waiting for electric guitars and drums.
Film Score
Some of the most imaginative music of the twentieth century is used for background music in movies. Wanna get your socks knocked off? Put in a DVD of "Singing In The Rain" starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. Find the scene called "Broadway Melody." Now, close your eyes and ignore what’s happening on the screen. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then, I give up.
I can’t begin to tell you how many movies have good music in them. Most, really, to be honest, and hardly any of them just string together pop songs. You want to get really amazed? Then check out old Warner Brothers cartoons. I’ve got a CD of this music, composed by Carl Stalling, and it’s nothing short of brilliant. A songwriter or musician should listen to this and wonder how anyone could think of it.
So here’s hoping you find in this the inspiration to look beyond the three-minute song.
The basic song form that is commonly used now is pretty flexible, which is probably why it’s so popular. You start out with a piece of a song. A verse, a chorus, maybe four lines, maybe eight, however it comes together. Aerosmith’s regular formula is to start with a chorus. Steven Tyler says that if you’ve got a good hook, you can write a song around it. It’s the same method that Merle Travis, the great Country picker, liked to use. He would take one line and write the chorus backward from that line, making it the final one. Then he came up with verses that led to that chorus.
AC-DC has simplified the process even more. Since the death of Bon Scott, the standard AC-DC song takes the title and repeats it four times. There’s your chorus. Some of Bon’s tunes used to be a little more free form, but the Brian Johnson era has been their most successful by a long ways.
There are four basic elements of music; melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Those are all part of even a line from a song. You put together a group of lines, you have a verse or whatever. What you do with the lines, and the groups of lines, becomes the form.
Let’s say you’ve got a verse. Let’s write one, right now, all right?
Oh, baby
I love you
‘Deed I do
Really do
Whew! Look out, Lennon and McCartney! All right, there’s a verse. Let’s call that A. I don’t know what music you hear in your head for that, but let’s say it’s sixteen bars long. In the key of C, so the piano players can do it without any black keys. So it’s four bars of C, four bars of F, four of G, and back to C for the final four. Now, let’s do a second verse.
Oh, honey
Glad you’re mine
All the time
Dipped in slime.
We’re in a hurry, here. Same chord progression. Now we haven’t discussed a melody, tempo, instrumentation, or any of that. We have the basic rhythmic structure and the harmony, and that’s it. But that’s enough to show how a basic song is written. So we have pattern A, then we repeat it. A A. Now we need a chorus.
Baby honey mine
Guess that makes me yours
Gee, that’s really fine
Going? Shut the doors.
Keeping up? Okay then. Change the chord progression around a bit. Two bars of F, four of C, two of G, and repeat. That keeps it the same length as the verse, although it’s not necessary. But an important factor is that it ends on the V (five) chord, which leads back into the next verse. Oh, yes, there’s another verse. So let’s call this chorus the B section.
Right now, we have three parts to our song; A, A, B. Oh, all right, let’s just repeat the first verse and stick it at the end. Some great songs were done that way. Check out your hymnbook next time you’re at church. Of course, the sky’s the limit. We could do a lot more. Chorus again, then another verse, or write a third section and have that be the bridge. That would be C.
Let’s take a quick look at a popular, highly regarded song; Hey Jude, by the Beatles. It’s laid out like this:
Verse
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge, which is that na-na-na-nananana part.
Or, A A B A B C.
This is basically how songs get written. Sometimes it’s that mathematical, by people who know how it’s done. Sometimes it’s practically by accident, by people who get lucky. The standard song form is so ubiquitous now, it’s pretty easy for even an unschooled amateur to at least know if he’s done it right.
Let me give you an example. You’ve given a kid a ream of paper and told them they can draw anything they like. Sky’s the limit. So they grab a pencil and begin. They start off with pictures of family, pets, things they know. They put away the pencil and get crayons, colored pencils, water colors, oil paints, pastels, and so on. They move on to pictures from their imaginations, which could be things that don’t even exist or have any conscious meaning.
You would think that this kind of freedom, with this much access to materials, that the kid would be able to reach to the heights of artistic accomplishment. And yet, when you gather the pictures all together, you suddenly realize that they’re all 8 ½ by 11 inches and have a white background. All 500 of them.
It’s kind of like listening to the radio. Song after song, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, one after the other. Switch from classic rock to country to easy listening to alternative and on and on. Different styles, themes, sounds, but in basic ways all the same; all 2 to 4 minutes long, constructed from verses, choruses, and bridges.
This century has been an interesting one from a musical standpoint. On the one hand, every time you turn around there are different sounds available and they’re put together in different combinations. An orchestra of instruments has been divided, recompiled, reconfigured and added to with yet whole new orchestras of instruments. To the strings, horns, and percussions of old were added electronic synthesizers and differing systems of amplification and recording, as well as effect treatments.
And yet for all this experimentation with tone and timbre, with rhythm, harmony, and melody, the basic form of composition has settled into what can only be called a deep rut. A perfect example of this is the band "Primus," which has certainly stretched the sonic boundaries of what can be done with guitar, bass, and drums. And yet, most of their pieces are still verse, chorus, and maybe bridge constructions of three to five minutes.
It’s like having a fenced-in yard in which you keep a dog. The dog changes shape until it’s a caribou, a tiger, a gerbil, or a sperm whale, and yet the size of the yard never changes. And it still can’t break free. So now that you’ve seen the fence, here are some listening recommendations that might help you find a way out of the confines of 20th-century song form.
U2
These guys hit popular music back in 1980 as if they just stepped off the mothership from another world. They wrote and played like they were just inventing music themselves. Drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. was the only trained musician in the group, and none of them knew how to write songs. They used this to their advantage and simply did what sounded best to them. I think it’s telling that Bono, upon accepting the Grammy award for Song of the Year for "Beautiful Day" laughed because the song had no hook. Check out their first album, "Boy," or middle period stuff like "Unforgettable Fire" and "Joshua Tree."
Frank Zappa
I could make a long list of rock songwriters who play around outside the norm, but nobody did it better than Frank. He considered himself more jazz than rock, and jazz has never really been comfortable claiming him either. He was actually more of a disciple of avant-garde composers like Edgar Varese and Aaron Schoenburg than any popular songwriters. The difference between Frank and his inspirations was that Varese, Schoenburg and their ilk made music that is all but unlistenable. They had to explain the intellectual basis for their music to get anyone to listen to it. Zappa, on the other hand, took the same intellectual groundings and made exciting, interesting, and sometimes even danceable records with it. His crude sense of humor was what tended to attract people’s attention, but the music was incredible. He made over fifty albums, and just about all of them are amazing, but some are rather difficult to stomach unless you’re really into toilet humor. I recommend "One Size Fits All," "Roxy and Elsewhere," "Freak Out," and "The Yellow Shark" for starters.
Progressive Rock
In the seventies there were a lot of bands that added synths and maybe a violin or a flute to standard rock and roll and called it progressive. Then, there were the real ones that rose above the pretenders. Groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Hawkwind, Nektar, Gentle Giant, and on and on. Extended composition was the order of the day, and album-length compositions were the coin of the realm. Plus, people came out of these bands after they broke up and stretched even further, usually in obscurity but the stuff is out there. Here are some of my favorite mind-stretchers:
Yes – "Close to the Edge"
ELP – "Tarkus"
Genesis – "Foxtrot"
Gentle Giant – "Power and the Glory"
Todd Rundgren – "Utopia"
Jethro Tull – "Thick as a Brick"
That’ll keep you busy for a while.
Jam Bands
As much as I dislike the Grateful Dead and Phish, the movement that grew in their wake has some pretty cool stuff. As a young songwriter, I was captivated by the notion that music moved in a linear fashion, but visual art like painting and sculpture was outside the boundaries of time. I contemplated the idea of music that could exist outside these boundaries. Then one day I realized that jam bands did this all the time. A good jam tune really had no beginning or end, just an endlessly revolving middle. Recordings do not really do this music justice, but even so I would direct you toward the work of Duane-era Allman Brothers like "Eat a Peach" and "Live at the Fillmore" for this genre at its best. Most good jam bands occupy a loosely-knot left field between country and blues. Just google "Bonaroo" for good links.
Jazz
That’s an awfully big area to cover. For our purposes today, look to Duke Ellington, especially "The Great London Concert" and his later bebop-influenced stuff. Also Miles Davis, who never stayed in one place too long. There’s also modern Free Jazz to consider. One particular album I would recommend for its sonic bravery is one from 1973 by guitarist John Abercrombie and keyboardist Jan Hammer, called "Timeless." It’s named that because they shied away from even using time signatures. Just about anywhere you go in Jazz, you’re going to find something interesting. Jazz was, and should still be, about breaking boundaries.
Classical
This is where the boundaries came from in the first place, in Western music anyway. The chromatic scale and the written language of music came from here. You would be hard pressed to find modern standard song form here at all! The deeper you get into the classics, the more inspiration there is to find. And many of these ideas have not even been scratched for use by a rock band. Just think of it; a whole palette of idea, just waiting for electric guitars and drums.
Film Score
Some of the most imaginative music of the twentieth century is used for background music in movies. Wanna get your socks knocked off? Put in a DVD of "Singing In The Rain" starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. Find the scene called "Broadway Melody." Now, close your eyes and ignore what’s happening on the screen. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then, I give up.
I can’t begin to tell you how many movies have good music in them. Most, really, to be honest, and hardly any of them just string together pop songs. You want to get really amazed? Then check out old Warner Brothers cartoons. I’ve got a CD of this music, composed by Carl Stalling, and it’s nothing short of brilliant. A songwriter or musician should listen to this and wonder how anyone could think of it.
So here’s hoping you find in this the inspiration to look beyond the three-minute song.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
FDR And The Difference - part 1
This is the first of two, or maybe three, pieces intended to give a little perspective on the current economic downturn and the stimulus package.
One thing that keeps coming up is the comparison between the current situation and the great depression. I’m sorry, I should have capitalized that; The Great Depression. It makes me wonder if one day this will have a cool name that we capitalize. The comparison, of course, is ridiculous. But who knows? It’s young yet. I’m sure they didn’t come up with The Great Depression the same afternoon the stock market crashed, while brokers were still hurling themselves out of windows. It probably took a while to catch on.
This is where I have a little bit of an advantage. I, you see, am 53 years old. What that means is, while I personally missed TGD (The Great Depression), my parents had vivid memories of it. They grew up in it, and it colored everything they did for the rest of their lives. So when people go on about how bad it is, I agree that it’s not good, but don’t start comparing yet.
As I write this, in March 2009, unemployment is at roughly 8%. When I got out of the Navy in 1976, it was over 10% nationally and had been for some time. It also stayed that way for, well, basically into the second or third year of the first Reagan administration. And nobody was really sweating it, or comparing it to TGD. That would have been, thank you very much, ridiculous. Yes, it sucked. Yes, it took me six months, SIX MONTHS to get a decent job.
But during TGD, unemployment averaged 25%. That’s not two-point-five, that’s twenty-five. One in four people in the whole country were out of work. For ten years. And when it started, there was no Social Security, no Medicaid, no Medicare, none of that. People were losing everything they had, and getting put out on the street, and starving to death. Literally starving to death.
That is why people of my parents’ generation credit Franklin Delano Roosevelt with saving the country. New Deal programs like the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and NRA (National Relief Administration) put people to work when nobody else could. It quite literally saved the lives of millions of people.
It’s good to remember what kind of times TGD happened in. One of the results of the First World War was the overthrow of the Russian government by the Bolsheviks. There was a lot of fear in this, and other, countries that Communists were planning a revolution. The United States was an emerging world power, and Socialism was an exciting new idea that was making its way from theory to practice.
America responded by swinging hard right, leaving behind the idealism of Woodrow Wilson for the "normalcy" of Harding and Coolidge. Herbert Hoover was a hero during and after the war for leading the relief efforts that saved millions in Europe. He went on to be Harding and Coolidge’s Commerce secretary and rode that wave all the way into the White House. The Twenties were a boom time and government was very friendly with big business. It was Calvin Coolidge who said, "The business of America is business." The early days of the Hoover administration were a resounding "Amen."
And then, eight months in, came the crash. The government battened down the hatches and hoped that business would solve its own problems. It didn’t. Things got worse, recession became depression, and times were tough. Real tough. Soup kitchen tough. Riots in the street tough. A tent city sprang up on the National Mall in Washington, and it was dubbed "Hooverville."
Hoover actually began many of the programs that Roosevelt later got credit for, but it really took Roosevelt to get things turning around. The whole point of these programs was to give people a way to survive until the economy came back on line. Believe it or not, if you read what Roosevelt had to say on the subject, it was never intended for these relief programs to become permanent fixtures. More on this later, in another piece.
There were also a number of regulations that limited business practices that helped cause the crash. One of these regulations was the Glass-Steagall act, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. It was the repeal of this act in 1999, by the Republican congress and approved by the Clinton administration, that is one of the keys of our current crisis.
My folks were actually pretty lucky. Their families lived in the country. They had chickens, pigs, a cow or two, and a garden. My grandfathers were loggers, and everybody ate and stayed warm. Basically, if you could pay your mortgage and buy flour, you could live. In the cities, it was different. I’ve heard stories of kids who would steal a piece of fruit from the grocer on the corner, and the grocer never did anything about it because he knew it may have been the only thing they had to eat that day.
As the depression wore on there was a growing unrest centering in the cities of America. People who were scratching every day for that day’s food and shelter watched as Lenin was replaced by Stalin and the Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler. Hoover was a hero in 1928, but if he had won the election of 1932 he may have been the last President of the United States.
The cold truth that too few Conservatives are willing to face is that mankind is a fallen race. Businessmen, for all they do to keep the engine of capitalism humming along, are human beings too. They fall prey to the temptations of money and power, and strive to gather more of both to themselves even when it’s to the detriment of their fellow man. If you make it possible for them to gamble with other people’s money, more times than not they will. Business needs to be regulated by the government, at least to a certain extent.
The cold truth that too few Liberals are willing to face is that mankind is a fallen race. Politicians, no matter how idealistic they are when they start on the road of public life, are human beings too. They fall prey to the temptations of money and power, and strive to gather more of both to themselves even when it’s to the detriment of their fellow man. If you make it possible for them to take the power to make decisions and take risks out of the hands of creative, hard working individuals, they will. Government needs to be limited and decentralized, at least to a certain extent.
If these two sides of the coin, these two edges of the sword, are not kept in a careful balance, things go all out of whack. This country had tipped too far in one direction, and is now in the process of tipping too far in the other. But as bad as it is right now, it doesn’t begin to compare to the Great Depression. For that matter, it’s not even as bad as the period between Nixon and Reagan. So please, the next time somebody says this is the worst time since TGD, do yourself and everyone else a favor.
Laugh.
One thing that keeps coming up is the comparison between the current situation and the great depression. I’m sorry, I should have capitalized that; The Great Depression. It makes me wonder if one day this will have a cool name that we capitalize. The comparison, of course, is ridiculous. But who knows? It’s young yet. I’m sure they didn’t come up with The Great Depression the same afternoon the stock market crashed, while brokers were still hurling themselves out of windows. It probably took a while to catch on.
This is where I have a little bit of an advantage. I, you see, am 53 years old. What that means is, while I personally missed TGD (The Great Depression), my parents had vivid memories of it. They grew up in it, and it colored everything they did for the rest of their lives. So when people go on about how bad it is, I agree that it’s not good, but don’t start comparing yet.
As I write this, in March 2009, unemployment is at roughly 8%. When I got out of the Navy in 1976, it was over 10% nationally and had been for some time. It also stayed that way for, well, basically into the second or third year of the first Reagan administration. And nobody was really sweating it, or comparing it to TGD. That would have been, thank you very much, ridiculous. Yes, it sucked. Yes, it took me six months, SIX MONTHS to get a decent job.
But during TGD, unemployment averaged 25%. That’s not two-point-five, that’s twenty-five. One in four people in the whole country were out of work. For ten years. And when it started, there was no Social Security, no Medicaid, no Medicare, none of that. People were losing everything they had, and getting put out on the street, and starving to death. Literally starving to death.
That is why people of my parents’ generation credit Franklin Delano Roosevelt with saving the country. New Deal programs like the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and NRA (National Relief Administration) put people to work when nobody else could. It quite literally saved the lives of millions of people.
It’s good to remember what kind of times TGD happened in. One of the results of the First World War was the overthrow of the Russian government by the Bolsheviks. There was a lot of fear in this, and other, countries that Communists were planning a revolution. The United States was an emerging world power, and Socialism was an exciting new idea that was making its way from theory to practice.
America responded by swinging hard right, leaving behind the idealism of Woodrow Wilson for the "normalcy" of Harding and Coolidge. Herbert Hoover was a hero during and after the war for leading the relief efforts that saved millions in Europe. He went on to be Harding and Coolidge’s Commerce secretary and rode that wave all the way into the White House. The Twenties were a boom time and government was very friendly with big business. It was Calvin Coolidge who said, "The business of America is business." The early days of the Hoover administration were a resounding "Amen."
And then, eight months in, came the crash. The government battened down the hatches and hoped that business would solve its own problems. It didn’t. Things got worse, recession became depression, and times were tough. Real tough. Soup kitchen tough. Riots in the street tough. A tent city sprang up on the National Mall in Washington, and it was dubbed "Hooverville."
Hoover actually began many of the programs that Roosevelt later got credit for, but it really took Roosevelt to get things turning around. The whole point of these programs was to give people a way to survive until the economy came back on line. Believe it or not, if you read what Roosevelt had to say on the subject, it was never intended for these relief programs to become permanent fixtures. More on this later, in another piece.
There were also a number of regulations that limited business practices that helped cause the crash. One of these regulations was the Glass-Steagall act, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. It was the repeal of this act in 1999, by the Republican congress and approved by the Clinton administration, that is one of the keys of our current crisis.
My folks were actually pretty lucky. Their families lived in the country. They had chickens, pigs, a cow or two, and a garden. My grandfathers were loggers, and everybody ate and stayed warm. Basically, if you could pay your mortgage and buy flour, you could live. In the cities, it was different. I’ve heard stories of kids who would steal a piece of fruit from the grocer on the corner, and the grocer never did anything about it because he knew it may have been the only thing they had to eat that day.
As the depression wore on there was a growing unrest centering in the cities of America. People who were scratching every day for that day’s food and shelter watched as Lenin was replaced by Stalin and the Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler. Hoover was a hero in 1928, but if he had won the election of 1932 he may have been the last President of the United States.
The cold truth that too few Conservatives are willing to face is that mankind is a fallen race. Businessmen, for all they do to keep the engine of capitalism humming along, are human beings too. They fall prey to the temptations of money and power, and strive to gather more of both to themselves even when it’s to the detriment of their fellow man. If you make it possible for them to gamble with other people’s money, more times than not they will. Business needs to be regulated by the government, at least to a certain extent.
The cold truth that too few Liberals are willing to face is that mankind is a fallen race. Politicians, no matter how idealistic they are when they start on the road of public life, are human beings too. They fall prey to the temptations of money and power, and strive to gather more of both to themselves even when it’s to the detriment of their fellow man. If you make it possible for them to take the power to make decisions and take risks out of the hands of creative, hard working individuals, they will. Government needs to be limited and decentralized, at least to a certain extent.
If these two sides of the coin, these two edges of the sword, are not kept in a careful balance, things go all out of whack. This country had tipped too far in one direction, and is now in the process of tipping too far in the other. But as bad as it is right now, it doesn’t begin to compare to the Great Depression. For that matter, it’s not even as bad as the period between Nixon and Reagan. So please, the next time somebody says this is the worst time since TGD, do yourself and everyone else a favor.
Laugh.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Government Regulation
Whew! Y’know, it takes a lot of stones to use filthy language like that, especially in the title. I might as well have called it &%#%, or @#%&, or even &*#^%$. Especially when I reveal that it’s about government regulations . . . that I approve of.
A lot of what this comes down to is some of the surprising differences between liberals and conservatives. Especially within the context of the dominant spiritual beliefs on both sides.
For instance, it is the liberals, driven by Eastern and New Age philosophies, that are the greatest advocates of the poor and downtrodden. It was they who argued AGAINST regulations that would have kept banks from offering the kind of loans, the adjustable rate loans that go from way-low interest to way-high, that got us into the trouble we’re in now.
Their reasoning was that it would allow people to buy houses that might not otherwise be able to. Ever. And we should encourage everybody to do everything they’re capable of. Because Humankind is basically good, and left to its own devices will always, in the end, do the best possible things. This is the thinking that gave us the civil rights movement, and railed against the war in Vietnam when all the Vietnamese wanted was to try a different economic model than we used. One that, on paper, looked a lot like the book of Acts, chapter 2. What could be more spiritual than socialism, where everyone was equal and all shared from a common pot?
This political philosophy says that marriage is an old-fashioned idea. That education based on learning by rote memorization is cruel and unusual punishment. That there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. After all, it feels good, doesn’t it? And abortion? Why, it’s the simplest form of birth control. Go ahead and have all the sex you want, with anyone you please, and if something unpleasant happens, a little local anesthetic and a snip and you’re free again. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Unless, of course, you’re rich. Or white. Or a Christian. Or, for that matter, male. In fact, sometimes simply being an American is bad. These are the belief systems and behavioral patterns that need to be restricted and regulated. These things are harmful, and need to be discouraged. Their narrow-minded adherents need to be persecuted and silenced. A strange thing for people to do that stand up for the persecuted and offer a voice for the downtrodden.
And then we have the conservative. In this country, conservative philosophy centers around tried and true Judeo-Christian ethics. Hard work, fidelity and honesty are rewarded. All forms of sin are discouraged. And to those who work hard and are creative, the rewards can be great. If you make a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Go ahead, drive a Mercedes, or ride in the back of a Rolls, or fly on a G5. You’ve earned it. And, it puts a lot of other people to work. Success makes you worthy of all the rewards you can enjoy, and all the power you can grasp.
Except that the same Holy Bible that tells us, if a man shall not work, neither shall he eat, tells us that no one is without sin, no, not one. Humankind is inherently corrupt. Human nature is base, and left to its own devices is drawn to sin. It is only by force of will and the grace of God that we can ever be truly worth anything, or do anything good.
So it shouldn’t really be a big surprise when the wealthy businessman or powerful politician abuses their privileges. When they manipulate the markets for their own gain. When they engineer the collapse of others’ fortunes to add to their own. When they conspire to make shoddy products and inflate the price. When they put their profits and their power above the good of their neighbor, or their nation.
It is the reason that no rich person ever seems to be truly happy. In their glory, they look down on the rest of us, and actively belittle those who serve them. And inside is the gnawing truth that, without all that money, they’re no different from the meanest, the lowest. They dread losing that money, and they know that another rich person would snatch it all away from them if they could.
And that is the failing of conservatism in this country. It resists using the power of government to restrict the activities of people who have no other restrictions put on them, save their own conscience. And that proves, too often, to be too weak a power.
When taken to its furthest extremes, both liberalism and conservatism can be taken too far. Liberalism can find its fullest expression in communism, which is totalitarian. Conservatism winds up as fascism, which is also totalitarian. And both can also lead in the other direction, to libertarianism and from there to anarchy. Human nature requires the rule of law for its own survival and growth. And yet, the writers and enforcers of that law are themselves human. Too much law is as bad as too little.
Some restrictions are necessary, as the banking crisis has shown us. I have a suggestion for government regulations that I think would have good effect.
One thing that cries out for regulation is the automobile. With oil being in the hands of robber barons, the less of it we use, the better. And, let’s face it, pollution is bad. I don’t know if air pollution causes global warming or not, and I don’t care. The simple fact is, it can’t be good to shovel tons of soot into the atmosphere. Anybody who advocates buying SUVs just to spite the Democrats should have their pool peed in. Let’s see what they think about a little pollution then.
Cars, and pickups and SUVs and minivans, should all be strictly regulated in regard to safety, fuel mileage and emissions. These things will lead to good results. The main reason for not doing it is that it would keep the cost of manufacturing and development lower, but these developments should be done. And the American public regularly shows that it prefers to buy big pickups to small cars, so the pickups, etc. should be included in the regulations. Is a Ford F150 that gets 15 mpg really that much better than one that gets 40?
I’ve seen in my lifetime how much cars can improve when they have to change to meet restrictions like these. Yes, I have fond memories of Boss Mustangs and Hemicudas, but a 2009 Toyota is safer and cheaper to operate, and you can even get them that go like a bat out of hell.
And if you regulate things like fuel efficiency, emissions, and safety, it relieves the companies of the temptation to beat their competitor’s prices by ignoring those things. Everybody has to meet the same marks, so quality and availability become the things that make your product stand out.
The trouble with too many liberals is that they cannot afford to acknowledge the significant progress that has already been made regarding things like air and water pollution. I once saw a pair of photographs that told quite a story all by themselves. It was two pictures of the Los Angeles skyline, taken from roughly the same location offshore in the Pacific Ocean. One was taken in the early 1960’s, the second in 1988. In the early one, all you could see was a cloud of smog with a couple tops of buildings rising out of it, and blue sky above. In the second, you could clearly see the city, even though there was a faint gray haze around it.
The automobile of today puts out less than 5% of the harmful emissions of its 1950’s counterpart. But when was the last time you heard a liberal thank the auto industry for this? No, and you won’t any time soon, either.
Just today (Feb. 14, 2009) I heard a fellow on the radio (NPR, of course) bemoaning the fact that the stimulus package that just passed through congress is too SMALL, because they took out some of the environmental spending.
"If an asteroid were heading for the Earth," he said, "and were going to strike in ten years, it would be the biggest story in the media." Every news outlet would be talking to every scientist they could find, and the urgency to destroy or turn the asteroid would be regarded as the most important thing for our government to spend money on. Why then is our impending doom from climate change so roundly ignored?
Because we’ve heard it all before. When I was in high school back in the early ‘70’s they told us that in ten years you wouldn’t be able to go outside without a wide-brimmed hat because of the destruction of the ozone layer. Well, guess what? Forty years on, the story this guy told smells of bovine excrement. The world likely will not come to an end in ten years unless an asteroid hits it, or the Lord brings his judgement on us. Or Al Gore smites us with his rod and staff. But intelligent regulation on the automobile industry is long overdue, for the good of all.
A lot of what this comes down to is some of the surprising differences between liberals and conservatives. Especially within the context of the dominant spiritual beliefs on both sides.
For instance, it is the liberals, driven by Eastern and New Age philosophies, that are the greatest advocates of the poor and downtrodden. It was they who argued AGAINST regulations that would have kept banks from offering the kind of loans, the adjustable rate loans that go from way-low interest to way-high, that got us into the trouble we’re in now.
Their reasoning was that it would allow people to buy houses that might not otherwise be able to. Ever. And we should encourage everybody to do everything they’re capable of. Because Humankind is basically good, and left to its own devices will always, in the end, do the best possible things. This is the thinking that gave us the civil rights movement, and railed against the war in Vietnam when all the Vietnamese wanted was to try a different economic model than we used. One that, on paper, looked a lot like the book of Acts, chapter 2. What could be more spiritual than socialism, where everyone was equal and all shared from a common pot?
This political philosophy says that marriage is an old-fashioned idea. That education based on learning by rote memorization is cruel and unusual punishment. That there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. After all, it feels good, doesn’t it? And abortion? Why, it’s the simplest form of birth control. Go ahead and have all the sex you want, with anyone you please, and if something unpleasant happens, a little local anesthetic and a snip and you’re free again. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Unless, of course, you’re rich. Or white. Or a Christian. Or, for that matter, male. In fact, sometimes simply being an American is bad. These are the belief systems and behavioral patterns that need to be restricted and regulated. These things are harmful, and need to be discouraged. Their narrow-minded adherents need to be persecuted and silenced. A strange thing for people to do that stand up for the persecuted and offer a voice for the downtrodden.
And then we have the conservative. In this country, conservative philosophy centers around tried and true Judeo-Christian ethics. Hard work, fidelity and honesty are rewarded. All forms of sin are discouraged. And to those who work hard and are creative, the rewards can be great. If you make a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Go ahead, drive a Mercedes, or ride in the back of a Rolls, or fly on a G5. You’ve earned it. And, it puts a lot of other people to work. Success makes you worthy of all the rewards you can enjoy, and all the power you can grasp.
Except that the same Holy Bible that tells us, if a man shall not work, neither shall he eat, tells us that no one is without sin, no, not one. Humankind is inherently corrupt. Human nature is base, and left to its own devices is drawn to sin. It is only by force of will and the grace of God that we can ever be truly worth anything, or do anything good.
So it shouldn’t really be a big surprise when the wealthy businessman or powerful politician abuses their privileges. When they manipulate the markets for their own gain. When they engineer the collapse of others’ fortunes to add to their own. When they conspire to make shoddy products and inflate the price. When they put their profits and their power above the good of their neighbor, or their nation.
It is the reason that no rich person ever seems to be truly happy. In their glory, they look down on the rest of us, and actively belittle those who serve them. And inside is the gnawing truth that, without all that money, they’re no different from the meanest, the lowest. They dread losing that money, and they know that another rich person would snatch it all away from them if they could.
And that is the failing of conservatism in this country. It resists using the power of government to restrict the activities of people who have no other restrictions put on them, save their own conscience. And that proves, too often, to be too weak a power.
When taken to its furthest extremes, both liberalism and conservatism can be taken too far. Liberalism can find its fullest expression in communism, which is totalitarian. Conservatism winds up as fascism, which is also totalitarian. And both can also lead in the other direction, to libertarianism and from there to anarchy. Human nature requires the rule of law for its own survival and growth. And yet, the writers and enforcers of that law are themselves human. Too much law is as bad as too little.
Some restrictions are necessary, as the banking crisis has shown us. I have a suggestion for government regulations that I think would have good effect.
One thing that cries out for regulation is the automobile. With oil being in the hands of robber barons, the less of it we use, the better. And, let’s face it, pollution is bad. I don’t know if air pollution causes global warming or not, and I don’t care. The simple fact is, it can’t be good to shovel tons of soot into the atmosphere. Anybody who advocates buying SUVs just to spite the Democrats should have their pool peed in. Let’s see what they think about a little pollution then.
Cars, and pickups and SUVs and minivans, should all be strictly regulated in regard to safety, fuel mileage and emissions. These things will lead to good results. The main reason for not doing it is that it would keep the cost of manufacturing and development lower, but these developments should be done. And the American public regularly shows that it prefers to buy big pickups to small cars, so the pickups, etc. should be included in the regulations. Is a Ford F150 that gets 15 mpg really that much better than one that gets 40?
I’ve seen in my lifetime how much cars can improve when they have to change to meet restrictions like these. Yes, I have fond memories of Boss Mustangs and Hemicudas, but a 2009 Toyota is safer and cheaper to operate, and you can even get them that go like a bat out of hell.
And if you regulate things like fuel efficiency, emissions, and safety, it relieves the companies of the temptation to beat their competitor’s prices by ignoring those things. Everybody has to meet the same marks, so quality and availability become the things that make your product stand out.
The trouble with too many liberals is that they cannot afford to acknowledge the significant progress that has already been made regarding things like air and water pollution. I once saw a pair of photographs that told quite a story all by themselves. It was two pictures of the Los Angeles skyline, taken from roughly the same location offshore in the Pacific Ocean. One was taken in the early 1960’s, the second in 1988. In the early one, all you could see was a cloud of smog with a couple tops of buildings rising out of it, and blue sky above. In the second, you could clearly see the city, even though there was a faint gray haze around it.
The automobile of today puts out less than 5% of the harmful emissions of its 1950’s counterpart. But when was the last time you heard a liberal thank the auto industry for this? No, and you won’t any time soon, either.
Just today (Feb. 14, 2009) I heard a fellow on the radio (NPR, of course) bemoaning the fact that the stimulus package that just passed through congress is too SMALL, because they took out some of the environmental spending.
"If an asteroid were heading for the Earth," he said, "and were going to strike in ten years, it would be the biggest story in the media." Every news outlet would be talking to every scientist they could find, and the urgency to destroy or turn the asteroid would be regarded as the most important thing for our government to spend money on. Why then is our impending doom from climate change so roundly ignored?
Because we’ve heard it all before. When I was in high school back in the early ‘70’s they told us that in ten years you wouldn’t be able to go outside without a wide-brimmed hat because of the destruction of the ozone layer. Well, guess what? Forty years on, the story this guy told smells of bovine excrement. The world likely will not come to an end in ten years unless an asteroid hits it, or the Lord brings his judgement on us. Or Al Gore smites us with his rod and staff. But intelligent regulation on the automobile industry is long overdue, for the good of all.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Local Phenomenon
The other day I was in a record store. Strike that; there is no such thing any more. CD store, I suppose, although they’re getting fairly rare. Anyway, this one was in Tilton at the Tanger Outlet. Music For A Song, it’s called. I was browsing through the CDs and came across a stack of discs by Jim Tyrrell. He’s a local artist, and I’m proud to say a good friend of mine.
It was really great to see Jim’s face looking up at me out of a rack of CDs. I don’t know if he’ll ever be seen anywhere else, but he certainly deserves to be. Very talented musician and songwriter, and I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy of his disc at your nearest record store . . . or whatever they’re called nowadays. There’s even a link to his blog right over there, no not there, yeah, right . . . right THERE.
There’s two reasons his CD is on sale at Music For A Song. One is that Jim is very talented. The other is that he’s driven. I think he still harbors dreams of one day being a big star. Not only can he play, sing, and write, but he works very hard on his craft. And even if he never gets to sell his CDs anywhere else, you can bet you’re going to get a quality product.
For myself, at the ripe old age of 53, I’m no longer worried about hitting the big time. That ship has sailed. No worries. Hey, at this point if I did get offered a record contract I couldn’t afford to take it. No way could I quit my job and go on the road. You know what the odds are of a new artist breaking through and having a hit? They’re astronomical. For every Dave Matthews, or Michael Jackson, or Hannah Montana, there’s a hundred – maybe a thousand – people that somebody thought was worthy of a record contract that sell three or four hundred copies and disappear without a trace.
That doesn’t stop me, though. I just flat love to write and play, and I’m going to keep right on doing it. And I know plenty of other very talented people who keep doing it, too. Here are some of them.
http://www.myspace.com/cobaltbluevt will get you to the myspace page of the best damned blues band in New England, Cobalt Blue. These guys rock. I’ve seen them as a 3-piece and a 5-piece. I also have their CD, which is excellent, and I mean that. I have a number of CDs and cassettes by friends and acquaintances that I never listen to. Sorry, but a lot of that kind of thing simply isn’t that good. Sometimes there are good reasons that somebody doesn’t get signed, y’know. But Cobalt Blue’s CD is on my player regularly.
The whole band is great, but the guy that most impresses me is the guitarist, Mike Bottiggi. He’s a graduate of the Hendrix/SRV school, but takes it to his own place. He also is a tube amp rebuilder/fixer/toaster who’s got the tone that comes right out of the ground and straight up your spine. You cannot listen to this guy and not be moved. They are based in Northern Vermont, and are worth travelling for.
http://www.abandcalledspike.com/?mpf=frame is for A Band Called Spike. If you like your rock hard, this is the place to go. What would you call this stuff? Punk metal? That’s probably pretty close. To tell you the truth, I don’t listen to a lot of this kind of music, but they do it very well. Jim Alger, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, is a very old friend of mine, but even that wouldn’t get him mentioned here. The reason I’m mentioning him and them is that they’re very, very good. The other day I put in the live DVD I have of them, and it’s great. Even though I don’t make this variety of music my first choice, they are compelling. They’re based in Massachusetts.
A good musician needs a good instrument, right? If you’re a guitarist, like I am, you owe it to yourself to check out Green Mountain Guitars at http://www.greenmountainguitars.com/index1.html. Glen DeRusha makes some of the best acoustic guitars I’ve ever played, and it is my goal to one day own one. Check out some of his craftsmanship at this site. Or better yet, get yourself over to Bradford, Vermont and see them first hand. Believe it or not, Glen loves to have people drop by and play his instruments, or even just hang around and talk guitars and music. He even lets me do it! What a guy!
It was really great to see Jim’s face looking up at me out of a rack of CDs. I don’t know if he’ll ever be seen anywhere else, but he certainly deserves to be. Very talented musician and songwriter, and I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy of his disc at your nearest record store . . . or whatever they’re called nowadays. There’s even a link to his blog right over there, no not there, yeah, right . . . right THERE.
There’s two reasons his CD is on sale at Music For A Song. One is that Jim is very talented. The other is that he’s driven. I think he still harbors dreams of one day being a big star. Not only can he play, sing, and write, but he works very hard on his craft. And even if he never gets to sell his CDs anywhere else, you can bet you’re going to get a quality product.
For myself, at the ripe old age of 53, I’m no longer worried about hitting the big time. That ship has sailed. No worries. Hey, at this point if I did get offered a record contract I couldn’t afford to take it. No way could I quit my job and go on the road. You know what the odds are of a new artist breaking through and having a hit? They’re astronomical. For every Dave Matthews, or Michael Jackson, or Hannah Montana, there’s a hundred – maybe a thousand – people that somebody thought was worthy of a record contract that sell three or four hundred copies and disappear without a trace.
That doesn’t stop me, though. I just flat love to write and play, and I’m going to keep right on doing it. And I know plenty of other very talented people who keep doing it, too. Here are some of them.
http://www.myspace.com/cobaltbluevt will get you to the myspace page of the best damned blues band in New England, Cobalt Blue. These guys rock. I’ve seen them as a 3-piece and a 5-piece. I also have their CD, which is excellent, and I mean that. I have a number of CDs and cassettes by friends and acquaintances that I never listen to. Sorry, but a lot of that kind of thing simply isn’t that good. Sometimes there are good reasons that somebody doesn’t get signed, y’know. But Cobalt Blue’s CD is on my player regularly.
The whole band is great, but the guy that most impresses me is the guitarist, Mike Bottiggi. He’s a graduate of the Hendrix/SRV school, but takes it to his own place. He also is a tube amp rebuilder/fixer/toaster who’s got the tone that comes right out of the ground and straight up your spine. You cannot listen to this guy and not be moved. They are based in Northern Vermont, and are worth travelling for.
http://www.abandcalledspike.com/?mpf=frame is for A Band Called Spike. If you like your rock hard, this is the place to go. What would you call this stuff? Punk metal? That’s probably pretty close. To tell you the truth, I don’t listen to a lot of this kind of music, but they do it very well. Jim Alger, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, is a very old friend of mine, but even that wouldn’t get him mentioned here. The reason I’m mentioning him and them is that they’re very, very good. The other day I put in the live DVD I have of them, and it’s great. Even though I don’t make this variety of music my first choice, they are compelling. They’re based in Massachusetts.
A good musician needs a good instrument, right? If you’re a guitarist, like I am, you owe it to yourself to check out Green Mountain Guitars at http://www.greenmountainguitars.com/index1.html. Glen DeRusha makes some of the best acoustic guitars I’ve ever played, and it is my goal to one day own one. Check out some of his craftsmanship at this site. Or better yet, get yourself over to Bradford, Vermont and see them first hand. Believe it or not, Glen loves to have people drop by and play his instruments, or even just hang around and talk guitars and music. He even lets me do it! What a guy!
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Billions, trillions, and 1932
What is a house worth? That’s one of the primary questions facing the United States of America on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama.
We’ve already set aside something in the neighborhood of seven hundred billion dollars to bail out the banking industry. $700,000,000.00. Just what is so industrious about a bank, anyway? Isn’t an industry something that makes something? Anyway, the reason the banks got in so much trouble was the bursting of the housing bubble.
What the bubble was full of was the hopes of an awful lot of people. They stupidly accepted a con. Some bank – and that term has become very, very loose – convinced them to sign for a loan on a house. The interest rate was low for the first, oh, say, three years or so. Then, it went through the roof. It said so right there on the paper. Hell, it said so on the TV commercials. I would watch those commercials and think to myself, "Who on God’s green earth would be stupid enough to sign up for one of those rip-offs?" Now we know.
So they defaulted on the loans. By the thousands, they defaulted. Red ink flowed like the Black Sea. And there sit the houses. What are they worth now? That really is the question, isn’t it?
Somebody buys a house. After three years and the adjustable rate adjusts, they can’t afford it any more. They default. But the house isn’t gone. It’s right there. Somebody owns it. And whoever owns it wants to sell it. Maybe they won’t get ten cents on the dollar, but they’ll sell it.
Let’s say the house went for a hundred thousand dollars. $100,000.00. Based on the neighborhood and the going rate for houses like it, that was the price. You sign a loan, and in the next thirty years you may actually have to pay nearly twice that, but the house is worth a hundred grand. Until you can’t make the payments. The bank takes it back, puts it on the market. After a few months, they’re willing to take 75 thousand. Then sixty. Then fifty. Sounds like they’d have been better off letting you refinance.
The whole 700 trillion figure is written on the air anyway. Think about this; you’re a real estate speculator. You own ten pieces of property, each worth a hundred grand. You’re worth a million dollars. But if you can’t get your price, you’re not worth that much. So if AIG, Bear-Stearns, etc. can’t get their price for all those houses, they aren’t worth as much as their stock says they are. And the price of the stock goes down. Crash.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the houses. Same house. Maybe even same people living in them. But if they’re worth less on the market, the value of the bank goes down.
So what? It’s not really an industry, remember? They don’t build the houses, they just own them. If a bank is worth ten billion because it owns ten thousand houses, and the price of the houses goes down, they’re worth less. They base their expenditures on the worth of the company. Everything from office supplies to the number of employees . . . to the bonuses of the top executives.
So now let’s say you’ve got a bank that’s worth ten billion, run by a CEO that is contracted to receive ten million. When it’s 1%, it doesn’t sound like much. When it’s suddenly 5%, and you’re laying off tellers and bookkeepers, it begins to look like a lot of money. And believe you me, the banks that will be getting the bailout money pay their CEOs a lot more than that. And now they won’t be getting that money from the sale of houses. They will get it from us.
I think I’m beginning to understand what a Republican must have felt like in 1932. A new President is about to take office and he’s talking about a stimulus package. A big one. One that will dwarf the TARP fund of 700 large. Oh, we’ve got to do it, just gotta!!!! Everybody says so. Everybody says, in fact, that the paltry 850 billion, that’s Billion with a B, isn’t enough!!!!!
I, the conservative taxpayer that I am, have my hand firmly clamped on my wallet. It won’t do me any good, but it’s all I can do. I listen to the talk about teacher training and bridge construction and road repairs and I know that these are all the government handing itself my money. They take it from me, and you, and pass it around amongst themselves and we’re supposed to be grateful that when they’re tired and need to go home they buy their groceries in the private sector.
The thing is, I am the child of people who grew up during the Great Depression. I’ve not only read the history books, I’ve heard the stories of people who lived through the real thing. This is exactly how FDR brought us out of the GD, and he really did. Rush Limbaugh can kiss my ass, because FDR really did save the country.
But it’s not 1932. The day Herbert Hoover handed over the key to the executive washroom, unemployment was over 25%. That means one in four workers wasn’t.
The depression lasted through the thirties right into World War 2. Wars are expensive, so that brought the economy back. There was a recession following the war, but in the 50’s and early 60’s everything boomed. Then toward the end of the Johnson administration we slipped back into a recession that lasted through the 70’s. The year I got out of the Navy, which was 1976, unemployment was over 10%. The last year before the 1980 election the Gross National Product rose 0.3%.
It took until 1982 for things to start turning around. So when someone talks about the Reagan Recession of 81-82, it was really the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter recession. Reagan ended it.
The bank bailout will ensure that nothing in the bank business will really change. The Obama stimulus package will ensure that we’re still in recession in 2012. Take it . . . to the bank.
We’ve already set aside something in the neighborhood of seven hundred billion dollars to bail out the banking industry. $700,000,000.00. Just what is so industrious about a bank, anyway? Isn’t an industry something that makes something? Anyway, the reason the banks got in so much trouble was the bursting of the housing bubble.
What the bubble was full of was the hopes of an awful lot of people. They stupidly accepted a con. Some bank – and that term has become very, very loose – convinced them to sign for a loan on a house. The interest rate was low for the first, oh, say, three years or so. Then, it went through the roof. It said so right there on the paper. Hell, it said so on the TV commercials. I would watch those commercials and think to myself, "Who on God’s green earth would be stupid enough to sign up for one of those rip-offs?" Now we know.
So they defaulted on the loans. By the thousands, they defaulted. Red ink flowed like the Black Sea. And there sit the houses. What are they worth now? That really is the question, isn’t it?
Somebody buys a house. After three years and the adjustable rate adjusts, they can’t afford it any more. They default. But the house isn’t gone. It’s right there. Somebody owns it. And whoever owns it wants to sell it. Maybe they won’t get ten cents on the dollar, but they’ll sell it.
Let’s say the house went for a hundred thousand dollars. $100,000.00. Based on the neighborhood and the going rate for houses like it, that was the price. You sign a loan, and in the next thirty years you may actually have to pay nearly twice that, but the house is worth a hundred grand. Until you can’t make the payments. The bank takes it back, puts it on the market. After a few months, they’re willing to take 75 thousand. Then sixty. Then fifty. Sounds like they’d have been better off letting you refinance.
The whole 700 trillion figure is written on the air anyway. Think about this; you’re a real estate speculator. You own ten pieces of property, each worth a hundred grand. You’re worth a million dollars. But if you can’t get your price, you’re not worth that much. So if AIG, Bear-Stearns, etc. can’t get their price for all those houses, they aren’t worth as much as their stock says they are. And the price of the stock goes down. Crash.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the houses. Same house. Maybe even same people living in them. But if they’re worth less on the market, the value of the bank goes down.
So what? It’s not really an industry, remember? They don’t build the houses, they just own them. If a bank is worth ten billion because it owns ten thousand houses, and the price of the houses goes down, they’re worth less. They base their expenditures on the worth of the company. Everything from office supplies to the number of employees . . . to the bonuses of the top executives.
So now let’s say you’ve got a bank that’s worth ten billion, run by a CEO that is contracted to receive ten million. When it’s 1%, it doesn’t sound like much. When it’s suddenly 5%, and you’re laying off tellers and bookkeepers, it begins to look like a lot of money. And believe you me, the banks that will be getting the bailout money pay their CEOs a lot more than that. And now they won’t be getting that money from the sale of houses. They will get it from us.
I think I’m beginning to understand what a Republican must have felt like in 1932. A new President is about to take office and he’s talking about a stimulus package. A big one. One that will dwarf the TARP fund of 700 large. Oh, we’ve got to do it, just gotta!!!! Everybody says so. Everybody says, in fact, that the paltry 850 billion, that’s Billion with a B, isn’t enough!!!!!
I, the conservative taxpayer that I am, have my hand firmly clamped on my wallet. It won’t do me any good, but it’s all I can do. I listen to the talk about teacher training and bridge construction and road repairs and I know that these are all the government handing itself my money. They take it from me, and you, and pass it around amongst themselves and we’re supposed to be grateful that when they’re tired and need to go home they buy their groceries in the private sector.
The thing is, I am the child of people who grew up during the Great Depression. I’ve not only read the history books, I’ve heard the stories of people who lived through the real thing. This is exactly how FDR brought us out of the GD, and he really did. Rush Limbaugh can kiss my ass, because FDR really did save the country.
But it’s not 1932. The day Herbert Hoover handed over the key to the executive washroom, unemployment was over 25%. That means one in four workers wasn’t.
The depression lasted through the thirties right into World War 2. Wars are expensive, so that brought the economy back. There was a recession following the war, but in the 50’s and early 60’s everything boomed. Then toward the end of the Johnson administration we slipped back into a recession that lasted through the 70’s. The year I got out of the Navy, which was 1976, unemployment was over 10%. The last year before the 1980 election the Gross National Product rose 0.3%.
It took until 1982 for things to start turning around. So when someone talks about the Reagan Recession of 81-82, it was really the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter recession. Reagan ended it.
The bank bailout will ensure that nothing in the bank business will really change. The Obama stimulus package will ensure that we’re still in recession in 2012. Take it . . . to the bank.
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