Wednesday, November 25, 2009

F for Fake and On Volunteering

While reading a blog post by The Smirking Chimp's resident curmudgeon BlueTigress (1) and with her help, in one of those aha moments, I saw another way of talking about my favorite theme, illusions; fake.

Mere synonym aside, the reason I'm making a distinction is that I like the vehemency of "fake" versus "illusions," the latter having more of a literate flavor, the high versus the low of "fake" or "phony". It has much more muscle. There's also another dimension to "fake" that I like; agency, planning or plotting, intention, motivation. Implicit in it is the notion that someone planned something and gave or executed it, no matter how stupid or well-thought out, poorly or masterly played. That's not necessarily inherent in "illusions" which implies the receiving end of perception, the one exception being magic tricks.

The great Orson Welles essayed on this very subject whose title I stole for this entry; it's nothing less than one of the most brilliant movies I've ever seen in both form and content.(3)



All of which - BlueTigress, Welles and my liking the theme of illusions - says that I think the term "fake" or even "phony" applies more accurately to American "capitalism" than "illusion," because it places the onus upon the people who wield conglomerated power.

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I admit to an experiment; see if I could write an essay whose footnotes were longer than the main body. I've succeeded.

1. While I couldn't agree more with her take on crazy liberals, particularly white-guilted ones, I disagree with her when she admonishes them by saying,

As for the self-flagellation crowd? Look people, what's done is done and cannot be undone. Rather than go "we're so horrible" go to the reservation and volunteer to teach the kids or volunteer to be the tribe's general helper. Work with the people who are here now, rather than try to raise the consciousness of people who don't care. You're wasting your time and irritating them, which makes them even LESS receptive to your message. If it makes you feel noble to eat your bread and water meal in a room that was purposely made cheerless so you could meditate on the injustice Europeans have done to the world, fine. And when you've emerged from your hermitage, and nothing is different, don't feel bad. You did what you thought best. But did it matter?


It's the part about volunteering. Let me be honest about it; fuck volunteering. It's unctuous, condescending and infantilizes poor people of color. As Jonathan Kozol so aptly noted decades ago, bleeding heart liberal white kids come and go in the ghetto every summer during internships... and yet the reservation/barrio/ghetto stays the reservation/barrio/ghetto and the white kids disappear, only to be replaced by the next crop. In a poignantly funny moment, I recall Kozol remarking how blacks would look at white kids who opted to go barefoot to show that they were down as crazy, for who would choose to go barefoot when they had perfectly good shoes?

By saying, "...rather than try to raise the consciousness of people who don't care," she ignores history and that ole sayin', there's more than one way to skin a cat. After all, in conglomerating around the issues of war, civil rights, women's rights, and Watergate, those issues were dealt with because it was so in your face, all the time, even in the music and movies of the day. It's also much harder to organize disenfranchised folks, let alone impart pragmatism that works in favor of their needs, and I suspect that's the reason even the "pragmatic and down to earth" BlueTigress would rather advocate for volunteering than organizing.

And an important point that seems obvious to me but which I find myself clarifying time and again in these arguments; I'm not questioning the intention(s) of people, I'm interested in effects. I can remember the first time David Hilliard started telling me stories about crazy liberals when I produced a series of programs with he and Luis Rodriguez (and later, Piri Thomas!) and cracking up. But then, one particular gig which was at Jerry Brown's compound, we had a couple of nut cases - one a butt fugly fat Asian lesbo tree hugger who was mouthy to the point of making everyone within earshot do the eye roll; shithead snuck in without paying, too. The other was the typical Berkeley liberally conscious yenta who looked like she orgasmed at the thought of the Dewey Decimal system and replete with her white fro curls, so full of self-righteousness and certainty as to what "progressive" was that anything outside of its bounds -- such as Luis' story of transcendence or the Panther free breakfast program -- made her throw up. She ended up leaving during the program, but not before making us all aware of how we were all so wrong for listening to this (re-write? revisionism?) "stuff." Of course, they were at the extreme end.

Mr. Hilliard's real point, of course, was that the world was overflowing with crazy liberals who mouth off with lofty idealism, "book smarts" and high ideals, but in the end, shoot blanks. And that's why people who are crazy liberals can't stand true progressives - because real progressives are grounded in equal parts idealism and pragmatism; they have a sense of high and low, are resourceful, have strategic plans, and last but not least, they do the work.

Volunteering, on the other hand, is selfish and done for the feeling of "doing some thing good," ostensibly for the Other, but inwardly, psychologically, deceptively, for one's own self, (trust me, the irony's not lost here). It reminds me of people who do nothing about oppressive systems 364 days in a row, and then dole out Thanksgiving turkey on Skid Row. It accomplishes nothing systemically and in fact continues the infantilization of the recipients. Like virtually 99% of American systems, it's a quick fix.

The other "real progressive scenario" is a lot of frustration with the odds against you and a lot of poverty because the disenfranchised aren't motivated toward conglomerating like capital interests who have attainable, concrete goals, clearer paths via systems they are players in and the connections toward attaining them.

In other words, one is temporarily playing at action, the other's real hard work with poverrty level wages or somewhere thereabouts. This way of looking at volunteering also comports with the theme, because fake is deception, and that is exactly what goes on internally within the volunteer; self-deception.

2. In particular, there's the notion of the relationship between film(maker) and spectator, which for lack of a better way of stating it relies on a consistent interrogating of the viewer, with doubt as its tool. This is a deeper relationship - or at least a more complex one - that goes far beyond the "talking to the camera" gimmick (Annie Hall) or the mere pointing of a camera at the viewer (a'la' the opening credit sequence of Le Mepris). No doubt Noel Burch has nailed this.

Of course, reflexivity is nothing new to the cinema - Porter's The Great Train Robbery comes to mind - but the (psychological) level and sophistication with which Welles engages the audience portends things to come... which never were to be.

The tragedy of Welles - Never underestimate the stupidity of the studio system to ostracize greatness and banish him to a promise unfulfilled and but a beautiful glimpse.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Cuts for Cooky: Peter Grant

I've been thinking of a way to broaden this category, so here's the first stab, a mention of Peter Grant.


Dude was so much larger than life that before a schlep like me had the slightest inkling of the way the world turned, I'd heard of Grant. It was probably in passing; a mention in one of the 70's staples like Creem or Interview (before it turned into the ho-rag it is), and no doubt in connection to reading about Led Zep. To call Zep's manager "just a manager" is like calling John Wooden "just a coach." He's that important.



That's Grant with Page and Plant. His claim to fame is the payouts he secured for Zep, reportedly 90% of the gate. This is of course impossible these days, but he was shrewd enough to know he had the biggest act in the business and he leveraged that fact to the hilt.


Even more was his personality, one that didn't suffer fools easily. His no nonsense approach in conjunction to him being physically huge (read: fat) led to his reputation. Put it this way; I didn't know the name of any other manager back in the day.



I think that's Bill Graham in the pic too.


The 60's and 70's were pivotal for obvious reasons, and it boiled all the way down to business. Take sports and Curt Flood's landmark stance for free agency, an historic act that forever changed pro sports. So too with Zeppelin and popular music, which with them paved the way for many other things, not the least of which is the shift from singles to AOR, or album oriented rock. That in turn led to making over radio stations, our MTV and Internet back then, and the way they approached playlists and advertising. It was not uncommon to tune into LA's mainstays KLOS, KMET or the legendary KPPC (always hard to get a clear signal on the latter, though) and hear full albums from back to front, often with a small break just to flip over a record.


DJs were also given freedom to create their own playlists and some would play lesser known tracks. This was how I taped a live performance of Zep's short-lived precursor, the Jimmy Page-led "New Yardbirds." On that tape I recorded Zep's mainstay, Dazed and Confused, which was flying under the banner then of I'm Confused and in a slightly less pretentious form.


History repeats itself, and now radio solely concentrates on singles - that's where the pr is. Concerts are now huge for the most mediocre talent; need I name names?


Lawyers run everything. [rolls eyes]


Here's a great story, whose truth I can't vouch for. It comes courtesy of the source for the first pic, one "Dara Lawlor," at:
http://advocatodiabolo.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/have-one-on-us/

This is a great rock ‘n’ roll story. It’s about Led Zeppelin boss Peter Grant’s exchange with a hotel manager as he was settling the bill following a typical night of room thrashing. The hotel manager was jealous that they were able to throw tvs out the window and not face the consequences.

Grant looked him in the eye, smiled, and said something along the lines of “you’re frustrated aren’t you?..I bet you’d love to do it too….Here have one on us” and added an extra $490 to the bill. The manager promptly ran up stairs and fired a tv from the top floor!



It wasn't all milk and cookies back then, and Zeppelin would have been a success with or without him. Yet there's no doubt among Page, Plant and Jones that their mega success was in no small part due to the fiercely loyal Peter Grant, the manager who changed the game.


Friday, November 06, 2009

14 TRILLION Reasons

I've gone on record as saying that Barack's a charismatic and accomplished guy, but before the election I told my circle of friends and relatives about my reservations. Those were founded upon the fact that he had very vocally advocated for and then voted for the bank/insurance bailout. Just as Hillary, McCain, Biden, et al, did, in the craziest rush to judgment on the biggest, riskiest, pure money bet in history.

Given that the banks did nothing to stimulate the economy via lending to medium and small businesses, let alone individuals, at least on any kind of significant basis, we now see that "lending" them this money was a huge mistake.

Or was it?

The irony of pre-TARP scare line "Too big to fail" not being lost on me in the post-TARP era of the recently conglomerated super banks, I wonder:

1. Ex Goldman CEO Paulson, as Secretary of the Treasury, lets Lehman Brothers, one of the few remaining competitors with Goldman, die. Doesn't that reek of conflict of interest?

2. How did they substantiate the TARP amount of $700 billion? To date, I've no clue. No one in mass media even asks, let alone with any semblance of consistency.

3. Why were there no stipulations on the money that only allowed Goldman, JPMrogan/Chase, Wells, B of A... to serve themselves with our money?

4. Why is it that as a result of bailing them out we now own GM and Chrysler, two crappy companies with four decades of shitty business models and clueless dinosaurs running them, and yet we do NOT own AIG, contrary to what the press has said. This reasoning is because AIG's stock has taken a meteoric rise Post-TARP. This would equate to massive earnings on our money, surely headline news. To date, nothing of the sort has broken in the media. This also applies to all of the newly conglomerated super banks - with all of the massive earnings Goldman and JPMC have made post-TARP, why is it that we only own the toxic, poisonous debt they gave us, nothing more, while they get to take our money, conglomerate and post record earnings that they horde to themselves???

5. Why has the government not told the American public the true cost of the bailout, which is now at over $14 TRILLION? See below, from Nomi Prins, for October, 2009, at:
http://www.nomiprins.com/bailout.html



[The owner corporations of America] spend billions of dollars every year, lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else....

...They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people … they’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them, it’s against their interests. You know something? They don‘t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting’ fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want?

They want obedient workers. OBEDIENT WORKERS.

People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, AND NOW, THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY. THEY WANT YOUR FUCKING RETIREMENT MONEY.

THEY WANT IT BACK SO THEY CAN GIVE IT TO THEIR CRIMINAL FRIENDS ON WALL STREET. [Remember these shitheads? Eeeeyeah.]

AND YOU KNOW SOMETHING? THEY'LL GET IT. THEY'LL GET IT ALL FROM YA SOONER OR LATER, CUZ THEY OWN THIS FUCKIN' PLACE. It’s a “Big Club.”

AND YOU AIN’T IN IT.

You and I are not in “The Big Club.”

By the way it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell ya what to believe… with their media … what to think, what to buy…

The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, no body seems to care. Good honest hard working people, white collar, blue collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt ya have one. Good honest hard working people continue… these are people of modest means… continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you.

AT ALL AT ALL AT ALL.

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care… THAT’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day.

Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called “The American Dream,” cuz you have to be asleep, to believe it.


-Saint George of Carlin

Malcolm and Huey spoke about the role of anger in resistance, and I remember Yuri Kochiyama telling me that she believed in righteous anger, that there was nothing wrong in it, but that it shouldn't be an end point.

We're way beyond the point of righteous anger by a factor of 10, at least in my reality. And yet, there's no collective will, nothing pragmatic, direct and constructive toward resistance. In fact, it's the worst "response" of all, the modern-day equivalent of the verbal "like, you know" tick; a shrug of the dis-empowered shoulders and a faux helpless look.

MoveOn dot org, indeed, these people make me sleepy.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Carbon Discredits

This is my second pub on Technorati:
http://pingerati.net/lifestyle/green/article/carbon-discredits/



The whole idea of cap and trade (or carbon credits or carbon offsets) is a dumb and moreover indirect way of tackling environmentalism. Futures speculating is fun for sports betting where - save for degenerates - quality of life or critical things like the environment aren't on the line, but it's a weird and indirect way of dealing with problems. Imagine monetizing something like speed limits into futures - absurd, right?

The answer is to deal with driving and speeding directly - pay to register and drive, pay for your license, pay to pollute (smog check), pay for your insurance, pay for your citations... etc. Direct seems to work. If you're a business that pollutes, why should it be any different? I'll tell ya why - with cap and trade/carbon credits, HUGE pools of money will be gambled that some think will dwarf the energy futures market. And therein lies the rub of this model - it's gambling. By creating a futures market out of pollution, the game makers have created a casino, and everyone knows that casinos make their billions off of the fish.

And the ones who will reap from Uncle Scam and Wall Street's newest casino are, once again, huge institutional pools of money. Matt Taibbi knows who they are, and guess what? They have an enormous edge. [This allusion's for Mitchy; ~~cue Jim Healy impression~~ I won't mention any names, but their initials are "GS", that's "GS." ~~cue Healy funny laugh sound effect~~]

Yeah, Yeah. Big surprise, I know.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Another One Bites the Dust, or, The Shit Parade: CIT Files Bankruptcy & Leaves YOU the Tab

Welcome to 2.3 BILLION more of your money that you'll never see, because crooks took it.
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NY Times, at:
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/cit-to-file-for-bankruptcy-soon/?emc=na

CIT Files for Bankruptcy

November 1, 2009, 2:15 pm

Update | 3:46 p.m. Three months ago, the CIT Group barely averted what it considered to be a ruinous bankruptcy filing that would likely have put the 101-year-old lender out of business.

On Sunday afternoon, the company filed for Chapter 11 — but under a so-called prepackaged bankruptcy plan that will enable it to emerge from court protection by the end of the year. (Read the filing after the jump.)

Sunday’s filing, made in a Manhattan federal court, caps months of efforts by CIT to stay alive. After being denied another bailout by the federal government, the company bargained with its creditors over a restructuring plan that would keep it operating and slash its heavy debt load, including $30 billion in bond debt.

While CIT had hoped to stay out of bankruptcy court through a bond exchange offer, that plan failed to win enough support from bondholders, the company said in a statement.

With $71 billion in assets and nearly $65 billion in liabilities, CIT is among the largest corporate bankruptcies on record, though it is dwarfed by the likes of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. The company said in its bankruptcy petition that it had $800 million in bonds maturing from Sunday through Tuesday.

CIT’s filing will test whether a financial company can survive the Chapter 11 process. Bankruptcy has long been considered a death knell for lenders, whose very existence depends on the confidence of its creditors and customers. The company’s struggles have been watched with interest and trepidation by analysts and the thousands of small and mid-sized businesses that borrow from CIT.

Yet the filing will still mean much pain for many parties, beginning with taxpayers. CIT received $2.3 billion in government aid last year, a bailout that came in the form of preferred stock. That will almost certainly be wiped out in the bankruptcy process, the first definitive loss in the government’s rescue of the financial system.

Jeffrey M. Peek, the company’s chief executive and the architect of its push to grow beyond its sleepy industrial-lending roots into a major new financial player, will step down by the end of the year.

Bondholders will receive about 70 cents on the dollar through the prepackaged bankruptcy, though the company warned that investors could receive as little as 6 cents on the dollar in the alternative, a free-fall bankruptcy that lacked a pre-approved reorganization plan.

Last month, CIT unveiled its debt exchange offer, which would have let bondholders tender their holdings for new, longer-dated bonds and preferred stock. But it also began soliciting votes for the prepackaged bankruptcy option. Under federal bankruptcy law, approval of such a plan requires the support of more than 51 percent of the number of creditors voting and more than two-thirds of the dollar value of those bonds.

CIT said in a statement that about holders of about 85 percent of its $30 billion in bond debt participated in the voting. Those investors voted almost unanimously to support the prepackaged bankruptcy plan.

Last week, the company secured several important agreements to aid its prepackaged bankruptcy plan. It obtained a $4.5 billion loan from several investors, including bondholders who lent it $3 billion earlier this summer. It also reached an accord with Goldman Sachs that would preserve a $2.13 billion loan even through bankruptcy protection, while paying only a portion of a $1 billion termination fee.

CIT also ended a fight with Mr. Icahn, who had offered to pay bondholders 60 cents on the dollar if they rejected the company’s prepackaged bankruptcy offering. Mr. Icahn instead offered a $1 billion loan, although people close to CIT said the company is not expected to use the financing.

The company will be represented in bankruptcy by the investment bank Evercore Partners, the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and the turnaround consulting firm FTI Consulting.

– Michael J. de la Merced

Pay to Play: EM08 in Micro

As a kid there was nothing I loved more than sports, particularly the NFL and NBA. I saw the rise of the Dasslers, free agency and, much later the ascension of Nike. While the majority of my attention has been caught by EM08, it took one of my favorite shows to bring home just how jacked as a nation we are. While there are plenty of enraging ramifications as EM08 continues its shit storm, the October episode of HBO's Real Sports contained a story so shocking to me that it made my already hot blood boil over. Looking back on my youth, I just can't imagine it without sports. But that's the reality for some American kids these days.

One of the most outrageous aspects to the story is that there is actually a proposal for "pay to play," which, of course, disproportionately jacks low income kids of color who start behind the eight ball to begin with. This is just... unthinkable to me.

Are there more tragic EM08 stories? Of course losing a home or compromised health care are more tragic, but I said shocking. These are kids who just want to play. Last time I checked, it doesn't get much more fundamental than that.
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HBO, October 27, 2009 at:
http://www.hbo.com/realsports/stories/2009/episode.151.s2.html

Game Over

In the sports hotbed of Columbus, Ohio, Friday nights are traditionally all about high-school football and Saturdays are reserved for the Ohio State Buckeyes. But this year, as the Buckeyes play on, Fridays in some areas in and around Columbus have been eerily quiet: no screaming crowds, no high school bands, no cheerleaders and no football. That's because one of the largest school districts in the state recently eliminated all sports and other extracurricular activities due to a lack of funds. As students, parents and others in the community wrestle with the aftermath of this decision, correspondent Jon Frankel talks to those affected and sheds light on a growing nationwide trend of school districts slashing or completely eliminating athletic programs that were an integral part of American public education for generations.

Correspondent: Jon Frankel
Producer: Joe Perskie