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Friday Night Music

Friday, January 18, 2013

Last week I wondered who did put the ram in the ram a lang a ding dong, and I got in answer in the comments. Turns out it was Cynthia Weil Barry Mann, this information coming via a commenter, who included a list of some of the great songs the co-wrote. Being as I’m beginning to get desperate in this feature, I was glad to get the list, because I figured there’d be something on it that would give me an idea for this week. I settled on the Drifters, who I don’t believe I’ve ever used before. Amazingly, I found this video, which is a pretty good version, and yes, for you youngsters, performers really did dress like that in the 70s. The song, however, is from the early 60s, but there’s at least a better than even chance that these are the original Drifters (well, at least some of them), though I’m sure my last week’s commenter would know better than I.

Okay, speaking of the Drifters, I couldn’t resist adding this one. I first starting paying attention to popular music when I got my first transistor radio. Back then, the number of transistors was considered to make a difference. My radio had a respectable six, though within a couple of years, I graduated to eight. This song was big when I got my first little Channel Master, and it’s certainly stood the test of time. Again, the performance is from the 70s, but the song came out in 1960, the dawning of the Golden Age of rock.

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Wow

Thursday, January 17, 2013

As David Atkins, at Hullabaloo says, the Onion couldn’t top this, which actually appears in the Wall Street Journal:

Poor, sad rich people. My heart aches for them. 
Really, no additional comment needed, but speaking of the Onion, I read recently, can’t remember year, that this will be a year in which it will often be necessary to preface statements with phrases like, “This is not from the Onion”. Yes, indeed. 
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Connecticut Truther

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

This woman almost became Connecticut’s Attorney General:

Go to Martha Dean’s Facebook page. That will be the only time you read that sentence on Daily Ructions. Dean, the 2010 Republican nominee for Attorney General has since Monday appeared to use her Facebook page to boost the vile conspiracy vultures gathering over Newtown’s Sandy Hook elementary school. A few minutes watching the video that Dean links with a “NEWTOWN SETUP?” lead in will give you a feel for the toxic content.

(via Daily Ructions)

And yes, I just linked to Kevin Rennie’s blog, but even a stopped clock…

If memory serves, Dean’s was the only down ticket race that was close in 2010. I guess that’s one bullet Connecticut managed to dodge.

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The Omnipresent Fox

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

My wife and I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts in Mystic on Saturday to kill some time while we waited for the train to Boston. The ubiquitous large screen television, a fixture nowadays even in some restaurants, was tuned in to the equally ubiquitous Fox News, which appears to be the station of choice for all such televisions, except those tuned to a football, baseball or basketball game. At least that’s the way it seems to me.

Ever so politely, I asked that the channel be changed. Ever so politely I was told that it would be. Ever so politely, I waited. And waited. Well, as I’ve always suspected, despite what on the surface would seem like paranoia, it turns out that my suspicion that Fox is imposed from on high is fact based, like so much liberal thinking. The friendly young man at the counter could not have changed the channel even if he understood the problem. As Dave Collins, who made the rounds of our local Dunkins reports in this mornings Day, there’s nary a one in the area not tuned to Fox, and here’s why:

My tipster told me he asked at the Dunkin’ Donuts in North Stonington, and the person behind the counter told him that tuning to Fox was a standing order of the district manager.

(via theday.com Mobile Edition)

So, I urge my reader in Southeastern Connecticut to join with me and boycott Dunkin Donuts. Some might say this is hardly a sacrifice for me, as I ingest neither coffee nor donuts, but as everyone knows, you always want something as soon as you can’t have it, so there is the theoretical possibility that this will impose a real hardship on me, much as my years long boycott of Walmart has been such a strain. Seriously, though, if we libs withdrew our custom, Dunkin would go down.

Collins is wrong about one thing, however. He goes on to say:

I suspect many gyms and other places that have televisions on all the time and a wide range of customers are careful about what kind of programming they choose.

Not so, Dave. My wife has struggled with the folks at her gym, who haven’t a clue what she’s talking about when she complains about the omnipresent Fox. And just after my experience at Dunkin I went to a business establishment run by a woman I know and respect in which Fox was providing misinformation. When I told her that I would seriously consider withdrawing my custom if she kept running it (the TV had just recently been installed, though the business has been around for a while) she looked genuinely perplexed. Like the folks at my wife’s gym, she simply had no idea that there was a difference between Fox and news. This particular business is, by the way, right near one of the poorest areas in town, meaning that she was passing on propaganda that demonized the very people upon whom she depends to make a living.

As a veteran of the long but successful campaign to stop smokers from polluting the air for us non-smokers, I know these things take time. At first, it was difficult to be the lonely voice asking the smokers to respect the rights of us long sufferers, but after a while it got easier, more people spoke up, and in the end, right and justice triumphed, and smokers were relegated to doorways where they belong. So when someone assaults you with Fox, speak up and demand that they stop imposing their propaganda on you. It may take time, but in the end we’ll triumph, and Fox will be relegated to the living rooms of the mouth breathers and comatose.

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Shocking news (not)

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

A few weeks ago I reported that my New Year’s prediction of faux filibuster reform seemed about to come true. Well, it now looks like Harry Reid is about to embrace a version of “reform” that, to us unwashed, looks a lot like the status quo.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) still wants filibuster reform. But he’s voicing support for a set of changes to the current filibuster rules that would fall short of the more sweeping proposal from leading reformers, and the leading Senate champion of filibuster reform believes Reid’s proposed changes are not strong enough.

In a locally aired interview over the weekend on a PBS affiliate in Las Vegas, Reid said he wants to require an obstructing minority of senators to occupy the floor and speak only after cloture has been invoked to begin debate. In other words, 41 senators could silently block debate from beginning, but once 60 senators vote to move to debate, filibustering senators must speak on the floor.

(via TPMDC)

Let’s see. Right now it takes 60 votes to pass a bill. This reform appears to …well it appears to..so far as I can tell it reforms things so that it will take 60 votes to pass a bill, only they have to be cast at a different stage of the process, and after they’re cast, the filibusterers get to keep filibustering until they get tired, some hint they can’t do now. I’m sure there’s an improvement in there somewhere, but I’m just not a subtle enough thinker to find it.

On the other hand, this reform appears to be better than the “bi-partisan” reform endorsed by Carl Levin, which would have made things even worse. We must be thankful for little favors.

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Unilateral Disarmament

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Obama has now unilaterally declared that he lacks the independent power to deal with the debt ceiling. There are some, actually there are many, who believe he has done so because an inability to act on his own is a condition precedent to his ability to claim he had no choice but to cut vital programs. Never has a president gone to such lengths to declare himself so powerless.

If I believed he’d stand firm and blame Republicans for the wreckage I’d feel differently, but I simply can’t believe it. It’s too out of character. There is a theory that they rejected the coin to make it clear to Republicans that there is no way out; that Republicans have to cave. Again, I wish I could believe it, and I hope it’s true, but we have a lot of history here, and none of it furnishes ground for optimism.

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Friday Night Music-Great Unsung Lyricists

Friday, January 11, 2013

There have been some great lyricists over the years: the Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan, the Ira of Gershwin and Gershwin, Cole Porter, Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, Carole King… why their numbers are legion. But some lyricists remain unsung, like that fellow who put the ram in the ram-a-lang-a-ding-dong. Well, actually I guess he was sung, but you know what I mean, we still don’t know who he was. So tonight, we celebrate two unsung lyricists whose nuanced and inventive lyrics have withstood the test of time, in the sense that you can still find them on youtube, and both are potential earworms.

Anybody can write stuff like Anything Goes, but it takes a guy with guts to pair words like Hanky, Panky, line and time and pack them with meaning many layers deep.

But that effort pales next to the inventiveness displayed in this gem from the 60s, and yes, I just love the audiences and dancers in these old Shindig shows. We’re we really like that? Actually, no we weren’t, but I guess we must have wanted to be like that, and I’m not sure which is worse.

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Yet another installment of “What Could Go Wrong?”

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I just finished Robert Sheer’s book, The Great American Stickup, which traces the roots of the current economic crisis back to the early 90s, when a bi-partisan (isn’t bi-partisanship great?) group of scam artists, including Phil Gramm and his wife Wendy on the R side, and Robert Rubin and Larry Summers on the D side, effectively deregulated trades in derivatives and tore down the wall between banks and investment firms. The one heroine of the book is a woman named Brooksley Born, who briefly headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Ms. Born suggested that the Commission might consider studying the question of whether it was really a good idea to unleash unregulated instruments like credit default swaps on an unsuspecting world and that something might, just possibly, go wrong, but she was squashed, it being obvious that 1) even a study of such things would destroy market confidence and 2) nothing could possibly go wrong. I am not misrepresenting on either of those points, that’s what the big guys said, including the sage, Alan Greenspan.

We’ve come a long way since then. Brooksley Born met her deserved fate. She was chewed up and spit out, and no one hears from her anymore. Something did go wrong, but curiously enough, this has not shaken the faith of the people who brought on this crisis that, in fact, nothing can go wrong, and if it did, well, these things happen and who could have seen it coming? Only people like Brooksley Born, and when was the last time she was on the Sunday shows, or was named an adviser to the president? There are lots of things Washington forgives, but it will never forgive someone for being right.

So that’s settled. Nothing can go wrong, and one thing you don’t want to do is be a Brooksley Born and say that something could. Fast forward to today, and we find that the SEC says that nothing could go wrong if it lets JP Morgan corner the copper market.

An SEC action that appears likely to do considerable harm to companies and individuals in the US and abroad appears to have gone completely unnoticed, save for an important piece in The New Republic by Linda Khan.

Heretofore, as Kahn describes, the main participants in physical commodities markets ex precious metals have been end users. While there have been reports of metals hoarding in China, it’s not easy for most investors to do since they are bulky. (Oil is a special case, since producers can speculate simply by “inventorying” oil by keeping it in the ground; above ground storage is limited and not as “efficacious” in the words of oil investor Dan Dicker, as one might think. The picture is oil is further complicated by the fact that the prices for OPEC oil are based on an average of futures prices, not spot prices, which producers found were subject to manipulation).

The SEC has paved the way for investors to take a direct stake in commodities, rather than through commodities futures. The agency gave the green light to JP Morgan to launch a fund whose shares would be backed by warehoused copper. The implications are not pretty. Per Khan:

In practical terms, the SEC handed traders at J.P. Morgan control over 20 to 30 percent of the copper available for immediate delivery from the London Metals Exchange — the commercial market where companies that use copper go to procure last-minute supplies.

The investors purchasing shares in J.P. Morgan’s fund won’t be buying copper to use, but to store. The intricacies of the fund are complex, but its underlying rationale is straightforward: the more shares investors buy, the more copper is taken off the market. And the more copper that is taken off the market, theoretically the more valuable the copper and the shares become.

Moreover, it’s a no-brainer that this JP Morgan “innovation” will lead to the creation of copycat fund in other markets, most troublingly those for agricultural products.

(via naked capitalism)

Keep in mind that none of this adds an ounce of copper (or a grain of wheat, when they start cornering that) to what would otherwise be produced. To an outside observer, it might appear obvious that the sole point of forming such a fund is to artificially drive up the price of copper so that the investors in your fund can get a huge return for doing something with no social utility. After all, why would anyone buy shares in this venture unless that’s precisely what they expected JP Morgan to do? Our outside observer might think this sounds like-well – like allowing an Enron to manipulate the market for electricity, but that’s because outside observers are so naïve. The SEC has looked into this, and perhaps because no one there wants to end up being a Brooksley Born, so far as it can see, nothing can go wrong.

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Meet the new guy, same as the old guy

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I know nothing about Jack Lew, who appears to be in line to be the next Treasury Secretary, but watch to see if the Republicans allow his nomination to go to the floor without a real fight. (There will be some token huffing and puffing because of the debt ceiling and because they are, after all, Republicans). If this happens, then he is Wall Street’s boy; another Timmy Geithner. It is little noted, and has not been long remembered, that Geithner breezed through, despite some tax problems that would have tanked a nominee that did not have Wall Street’s blessing, and in the end, the Republicans will dance to Wall Street’s tune on this nomination.

So, a few minutes after I wrote the above, I found this, which pretty much tells us all we need to know.

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Beggars can be choosers

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

What a great country! Beggars can be choosers, provided, of course, that they’re rich enough.

Fresh from paying back a $182 billion bailout, the American International Group has been running a nationwide advertising campaign with the tagline “Thank you America.”

Behind the scenes, the restored insurance company is weighing whether to tell the government agencies that rescued it during the financial crisis: thanks, but you cheated our shareholders.

The board of A.I.G. will meet on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal’s high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer’s Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for “public use, without just compensation.”

(via NYTimes.com)

So, this is a bit like a beggar suing a guy who gave him a buck on the grounds that the donation was totally insufficient. In AIG’s case, I’ve always felt we should have averted our eyes when we saw its outstretched hands, but I’m not a Washington wise man.

Apparently the AIG shareholders take the position that having undertaken to bail them out, Washington had a duty to do so in a way that would optimize their financial position, while the silly rest of us thought the government’s duty was to the country at large.

We taxpayers can sympathize in one respect. We can all agree that it wasn’t a good idea to pay 100 cents on the dollar on those credit default swaps, as little Timmie insisted.

The government, Starr argues, used billions of dollars from A.I.G. to settle credit-default swaps the insurer had with banks like Goldman Sachs. The deal, according to the lawsuit, empowered the government to carry out a “backdoor bailout” of Wall Street.

(via NYTimes.com)

Sure, it would have been better for everyone concerned had the government told Goldman Sachs to pound sand, because Goldman had to be well aware that AIG lacked the reserves to pay off the swaps, and it was therefore relying on its (as it turned out well–founded) expectation that the government would step in when the economy blew up, ad Goldman was betting it would. So we can all agree that the country would be better off if Goldman had not been paid, but then that forces us to conclude that we’d be better off had we left AIG to face its fate alone, thereby reducing the stock price to zero. That, presumably, is where we part company with the AIG shareholders.

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