Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President, 1924-2024--

 

Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Niles Rodgers, and the Allman Brothers Band's favorite POTUS. And my first vote for a president, although I cannot say I paid too close attention to President Carter's term in office and the year I voted for him in 1980 he actually lost. In retrospect based mostly on the account in Walter Karp's Liberty Under Siege (1989), I've always understood Carter's presidency as this decent guy who wasn't up to the big money hardball politics going on in Washington. I believed the 1980 October Surprise theory from the first time I heard it. It was like a coup de grace to Carter's term in office, Reagan and Beltway insiders stealing his lunch money. The way Carter's humanitarian strengths and integrity blossomed and flourished after his presidency has only seemed to corroborate Karp's take. Carter's humility and honesty and generosity were his superpowers, and traits not tolerated much in the special interest meat grinder of the  halls of government. Carter lived a century but the timing of his passing might be a mercy in that he won't have to see what comes next for the country and maybe the loss of a politician and leader like him might raise the alarm a little about the peril the country is facing as the result of the recent election. Wonder how the Carter Center would have assessed the integrity of the US election as official observers, as they have done other elections all around the world? What might they have had to say about the Russian bomb scares and Musk's billions flooding the zone with disinformation down the stretch? I've never really thought much about Carter as the rock & roll POTUS, or until the documentary of the same name came out in 2020 anyway. But I do remember Hunter S. Thompson loved him. And I remember he was the first president to walk in an inaugural parade and he put solar panels on the roof of the Whitehouse. And I can't remember ever seeing any other president in a fan t-shirt for a rock & roll band like he appears in the doc in one for The Allman Bros. Also in the doc Carter says the first artists he thought of inviting to play at his inauguration were Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin; not exactly Elvis and Tina Turner but rock & roll-ish enough. By comparison, I think Reagan was still into the Rat Pack. The Bushies were into country music, reportedly. Clinton was into Fleetwood Mac and played the saxophone. Obama was always doing playlists like he was a rock critic. Biden tried to follow suit but his heart wasn't in it so his lists came off even cringier than Obama's. And before Carter, according to the internet, Gerald Ford was a jazz fan and Nixon only listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries with the volume set to 11, just kidding. And Grump appears to like all rock and pop music only once it's been played to death, bloated, and bad. So it is Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President. RIP.  

Addendum: Several of my favorite journalists are pointing out in the wake of Carter's passing that features of the neoliberal order, conventionally attributed to Reagan winning in 1980, actually got going under Carter. I've been aware of this case for awhile but always bristled at the argument. 

Deregulating the trucking industry isn't the same as making opposition to all regulations and taxes on wealth official admin policy or making regulations and taxes anti-growth curse words. Neolib boilerplate: Government interventions in the economy-- i.e., taxes and regulations-- are bad, always bad, and should always be scorned and condemned. The only thing equally bad is government spending that might require more taxes and regulations. 

Although, in historical fact, various gov regulations and taxes protecting labor, public health, and the environment have been around for over a hundred years and are essential to the general prosperity and peace of society. They are essential to keeping the food we eat and the air we breathe from poisoning and killing us. It's that basic. Sure, Carter was into Christian austerity but also into lots of Christian charity. Keep it simple: Milton Friedman, Mr. Neoliberal Austerity Economics, advised Reagan and dissed Carter.

Anyway, drives me crazy how people in politics can get so self-servingly binary about this stuff. Deregulating anything equals Neoliberalism. No it doesn't. Cutting any waste in government is austerity. No, cutting essential social safety net spending in the caring economy or cutting spending on public infrastructure is austerity. And, actually, regressive taxes on the bottom 50% of income earners ought to be cut and progressive taxes on exorbitant wealth hoarding ought to be increased. So I can get a little defensive about this argument that Carter was a Neolib. Still, have to concede some points on the matter to this passage from Tim Barker substack post @ Origins of Our Time: 

By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”

Who knows Eizenstat's intentions four years into the Reagan Revolution but point taken. As a heart breaking example of Carter's "fiscal moderation" and austerity turns out he recommended cutting social security. I know, a different time, stagflation, the gov had to do something. But by punishing the elderly poor? This doesn't taint his Habitat for Humanity home building work but it does put it possibly in a new light? Building homes for the poor as penance? 

Anyway, Carter's takes on the infamous 2010 Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling allowing billionaires and Big Business to spend literally as much as they want promoting austerity and sabotaging our democracy adds perspective. Compiled by Public Citizen:

Citizens United is an “erroneous ruling” and “the most stupid decision the Supreme Court ever made.”

Citizens United has turned America into an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”

Citizens United “violates the essence” of our democracy and represents “the biggest change in America” since I was elected in 1976.

Citizens United has left everyday Americans “cheated out of” the chance to make their lives better.

Citizens United has led to “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

To corporate rule neoliberalism means maximizing capital wealth accumulation for the oligarchy and austerity budgets for everyone else. Jimmy Carter was NOT a Neoliberal. His Christian austerity was an equal opportunity austerity. 

Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice: New Wave Romantics on Postcard Records

"We avoided the two major rock guitars, the Fender and the Gibson. Playing Gretsches was about bringing back a sixties sensibility, but still having the freneticism of punk. Nobody else used them at the time."--Edwyn Collins in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds 

Orange Juice were a post-punk outfit from Scotland early 1980s. A New Wave band into reading. Proto-New Romantic British pop in an indelibly Scottish jangle pop indie record label style. Edwyn Collins' style, OJ's nerdy Lothario front guy. Sort of Brian Ferry as a "New Puritan." And another post-punk vocal original. 

Orange Juice were the feature band on Postcard Records, a Glasgow indie label that put out 12 singles and an album between 1979 and 1981. The album featured label mates Josef K, named after a character in Kafka's The Trial, and true to form sounding like Gang of Four agit-funk with a literary bent. 

Postcard were dedicated in general to "The Sound of Young Scotland" with a romantic literary bent, in spite of or because the label's boss, Alan Horne, was something of a parochial Spinal Tap-like eccentric petty tyrant band manager type. Postcard also put out records by Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens (notably not Scottish) and for a few years there were a promising post-punk enterprise from the north country of Great Britain. 

Orange Juice joined The Undertones on tour in the fall of 1980. What a hot double-bill that would have been!

At any rate, after one good album, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (1982), a couple more iffier album propositions, pioneering the C86 jangle pop sound but unable to score the chart hits they wanted, the OJ's called it quits in 1985 but Edwyn Collins finally scored a couple of proper Top 40 hits in the 1990s as a solo artist. Here's one:  

"The Magic Piper (Of Love)," Edwyn Collins (1997)

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR)

 "In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

[On December 10, 1948, 48 of 58 members voted in favor of the UDHR, 8 abstained (South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and 6 then Soviet states) and 2 members were absent (Honduras and Yemen)]: 

Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.

The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable."

Letters from an American Historian 

It Was The Snake!

 

"The Snake," PJ Harvey & John Parish, 1996, Peel Session. Short, not sweet, half way through almost breaks the spell with-- "You salty dog!"-- but in the end the salty aside only helps bring home the sexual furies of Eve's betrayal. Blockbuster post-punk distaff artsong rage. Kim Gordon and Kathleen Hanna and Fiona Apple big fans.   

Christmas is for kids...

Art Critic Dave Hickey on Normal Rockwell

Is "Expansionary Fiscal Contraction" returning to America?

 "There is no evidence – and never has been – that austerity (cutting to grow) works in the fashion promised by those who support it so vehemently. Britain – used as a laboratory rat in order to prove that expansionary fiscal contraction works – is proof of that, as are the examples of Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

The UK experiment began three years ago [2010] when the coalition came to power. The timing could hardly have been better for the new breed of expansionary fiscal contractionists at the Treasury. The deficit was at a peacetime record, the economy appeared to be on the turn and, as an excellent new book by Mark Blyth shows, it was the time when the brief one-year dalliance with Keynesian economics had just hit the buffers."

Larry Elliott @ The Guardian

Meaning, by "buffers," hit the wall of the austerity police in banking and government in the aftermath of the debt crisis that followed the economic recession in Europe in the late '00s. I happen to be reading Blyth's austerity book right now: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. It's a brilliantly plainspoken and illuminating history of austerity economics for dummies like me; i.e., readers enthusiastic about economic history but don't want to deal with too much math. Austerity is the stock position of capital, or rich elites, whenever the demands of workers or the environment threaten bottom lines, or whenever the tenor of the times is such that governments are contemplating raising taxes or imposing more regulations on business. Austerity always says the same thing: it costs too much; it being wage and/or benefit increases, climate change reforms, public infrastructure, etc. Spending increases budget deficits. Spending depresses growth. To expand economic growth we need to cut spending and cut taxes and regulations and let the job creators create jobs. Which is almost precisely the path the new admin is about to embark us all on, if I'm not mistaken. Cutting social programs to expand Billionaire profits, or that's the threat anyway. Ack! 

I am not suggesting there isn't waste in government, or that efforts to reduce waste are always in bad faith, but I am saying conservative corporate rule efforts to reduce "waste" are almost always bad faith and really a now timeworn tactic to resist government or labor or environmental or any other claims on their wealth, no matter how legitimate or even economically pro-growth. 

Krugman says the US economy is basically a massive insurance organization with an army. So much of what the government does is pass through insurance payouts for stuff private industry cannot or will not produce or pay for. 

We know the military budget is where most the waste in the federal budget is but they'll cut more cancer research for children, as they've apparently already done, before even looking at the military budget. Or cut other absolutely necessary social safety net stuff: health care, social security, and other social programs and public infrastructure crucial to 70-80% of the population but wasteful "entitlement" spending to richies that can afford their own social insurance. 

Some inequality in a big complex society is inescapable but some inequality is so bad it discredits society and the whole economy and rule of law. It makes such norms appear as mere shams and dysfunctional rackets. Billionaires and homeless encampments juxtapose like that. 

"Ska War," Prince Buster (featuring Toots and the Maytals) 1964, Blue Beat.

Here's that old trick of dance music. Turning sex machine-like repetition and even monotony into ecstatic dance grooves, a cultural form of momentary physical liberation as old as village societies. This record sounds like they could be recording the scene on the cover. A big sound system booming from outside the shot. Prince Buster and Toots from Toots and the Maytals are MC'ing, toasting back and forth about the "jungle" and taking it to "Broadway." The dancers are shouting and chirping rhythmic accents, like they were cheering and chiding each other on to the unmitigated glory of shaking your thing. Goofing. Lots of laughter. Effective dance grooves make repetition, that often feels rote and like tedious overkill to those unmoved by its pulse, feel involuntary and wonderfully compulsive to dancers and dance music lovers. This rustic ska reggae jam clocks in at a traditional pop song 2:53 but feels like all great dance music: like you never want it to stop. "Come fly with me." Sublime. 

AOC Gets Snubbed by Dem Leadership

 "The race between AOC and Connolly [for Head of the House Oversight Committee] was broadly seen as not just representing a competition between two people but two different futures for the Democratic party. AOC represented a generational shift: a fresh young face and energetic communicator who represents a more anti-establishment spirit. Connolly was business as usual for the Democrats. For a while, it seemed like AOC had a real shot at winning, but then 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi, recovering in hospital from hip-replacement surgery, reportedly made a bunch of phone calls and urged people to back Connolly. On Tuesday, he won by a vote of 131-84."

Arwa Mahdawi @ The Guardian

At the precise time the Dems are recovering, regrouping, after an electoral loss many postmortems attribute to non-college working classes identifying more with the other party the Dems shoot themselves in the foot again. AOC is working class, for crying out loud! 

Basically, this is the Dems trying to reassure "fiscal conservatives" and business elites and check or block working class interests and voices in the party. I appreciate seniority values, being a senior myself perhaps more than ever, but this isn't just an ageist issue. Elevating AOC in responsibility and leadership, after the electoral loss in November, was a no-brainer and would be a significant positive step going forward for the party. 

I felt more or less the same way about Sanders and Warren after the 2016 loss. Their voices should have been elevated in the party establishment as a progressive reform. Instead, they were shunned or marginalized. Admittedly, and thankfully, Biden did at least partially correct for this DNC neglect by creating a constructive relationship with the congressional progressive caucus during his term. 

And, please, make no mistake, these snubs weren't for their cultural liberalism or identity politics. The party establishment is objecting to their economic populism; their open advocacy for working class interests.  In particular, I wouldn't be surprised if this snub is at least partly attributable to AOC's open support for banning stock trading by legislators. Pelosi opposed such a ban in 2022 and this is likely a big part of the "trust" Connolly won the committee chair position with.  

Breaking News: TPM, Josh and Kate, posted their weekly podcast, "AOC Snubbed," four days before I posted the above hot take, although I swear I hadn't heard it before today. Of course, it's smarter, better informed, more insider baseball on politics than I'll ever be, so if the AOC snub story interests you it should not be missed. 

Copy and paste into your browser ought to get you there: 

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/podcasts/the-josh-marshall-podcast/ep-354-aoc-snubbed/

Notes: I don't always keep up with the podcast. But this is a particularly good one. Josh is his usual irreverent and big picture hardball politics historical takes self. But Kate is in especially rare and  fine form, her ire up over the Dems snubbing AOC. By the end they're apologizing a bunch, again, especially Kate, for being such downers, ranting against the Dem leadership for way longer than they'd planned. Not at all. Singing my song on this story, for sure. 

I'd only like to add another way to look at that Whip vote that went 130-something for Connolly over 80-something for AOC, even more downer than TPM's take. Consider this a speculative reframing of the behind the scenes question House dems faced: Which do you think is more important to the agenda of the Dem oversight committee in the coming congress: 1) Reassuring our biggest donors or 2) raising to a position of leadership one of our most popular and articulate younger voices, who happens to be in fact working class and a woman and under forty?! A super majority of the House Dems, no sweat, chose Kate's "defensive crouch," again. 

AOC's another self-identifying "socialist" and might alienate more of the "fiscal conservative" Dems in the swing states, blah, blah. It isn't that hard to imagine how it would go. And as long as the two parties are perceived as more or less equal on the economy, or equal on their support for working class interests, many more in the working classes will fall for the bigot culture war stuff. The "illegal" immigrants are taking all our jobs, etc.     

What's-- Still-- the Matter With Kansas?

"[Thomas] Frank warned that Kansas’s political realignment [after 2000] would go national, forcing American voters to choose between business-friendly fiscal conservatives and business-friendly fiscal conservatives who hoisted rainbow flags. That dystopian moment arrived in 2016, when “America’s blue-collar billionaire” won 62 percent of the white working-class vote."

Erica Etelson @ The Nation

Just talking with friends about how pre-2016 contemporary political books feel extra dated and irrelevant after the radical political changes of last eight years. But Frank's book from 2004, which I haven't read, might be the exception? Certainly, the above formulation sounds apt. 

And "white working-class" feels like the key qualifying adjective here but I saw something online suggest that the partisan switch in Kansas, according to Frank, actually wasn't attributable to racism. That doesn't sound right but what about homophobia? Or other forms of culture war bigotry? This is how I take Etelson's quote, anyway: If both parties are perceived as being more or less equally "business-friendly fiscal conservatives," meaning always opposed to government spending (that helps the working classes), then stupid bigots are going to more easily be demagogued into opposing "rainbow flags" or Trans or "wokeness" as lynchpin culture war election issues.  

Grump was definitely onto something in 2016 when he came out against NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. These agreements were terrible for American labor. Neolibs or supply-siders argued that this "free trade" would promote economic growth and move US labor up the labor value chain, offshoring cheap manufacturing jobs for better jobs in the finance and administration of global trade. These agreements did do that but did so by adding one banker for every four well paying working class jobs in manufacturing lost by the turn of the century and the blight of the "Rust Belt," which at this point feels like it has spread to engulf more or less all of rural America.

So Grump was right to protest so-called "free trade" agreements that favored capital over workers and the environment but his subsequent reforms of these trade agreements, not to mention his other trade-wars and tax cuts for the rich, turned out to be mostly empty bluster, completely indifferent to predatory capitalism, and did absolutely nothing for the working classes. And the truth is the two parties do not equally favor business elites over workers and never have or at least not since the New Deal and the 1930s, and it wasn't even close in the Biden/Harris vs Trump contest. 

The question now, I'm afraid, will be how bad it will have to get for the working classes before they figure out they've been had by Grump and the republicans, again? 

P.S. I'm also hearing analysts attributing voting shifts towards Grump and republicans in minority working class communities to frustrations with homelessness and crime. Again, assuming the republicans are better on crime is an electoral reflex at this point so divorced from reality as to be pathological. Grump will obviously not reduce homelessness or increase respect for law and order. He, in fact, obviously inspires grifting and violence. Imagining he is an antidote to crime is a fake-news perception of staggering consequence.  

Federal Judges Increasingly Alarmed

 “On January 6, 2021, an angry mob of rioters invaded and occupied the United States Capitol, intending to interrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” Lamberth wrote. “No matter what ultimately becomes of the Capital Riots cases already concluded and still pending, the true story of what happened on January 6, 2021 will never change.”

Chutkan, on Monday, said she fully endorsed Lamberth’s words.

“This is the United States Capitol — the people’s house,” Chutkan said. “They trashed it. They treated it like a motel room after a concert. … Engaging in an act of destruction and violence in order to halt the peaceful transfer of power has to be met by consequences.”

Politico

We know Grump is always mouthing off with threats about stuff he can't do or has moved on to a new threat before following through with the last one (gratefully) but he's promised repeatedly to pardon the Jan 6-ers and all indications are he can pardon them and will as soon as he is back in office. I know we'll be second-guessing the tragic descent of the country for years but would have been nice if more of these federal judges expressed alarm when SCOTUS "pardoned" Grump last summer or when Roberts refused to sit for his second impeachment or when the GOP, openly admitting to Grump's guilt, failed to impeach him for his election interference in 2020. Or convict him for his treason in 2016 or his violence against immigrants and protesters or his lifelong career as a financial fraudster, etc. Still think the biggest fail in all of this, more than the stupidity of the electorate, is the partisan republican corruption of the legal system and SCOTUS. 

 

"Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while."

Josh Marshall @ TPM

ABC News Adopts Zero-Tolerance Policy for News

 NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Going forward, ABC News will have a “zero tolerance policy for news,” the CEO of parent company Disney said at an all-hands meeting on Thursday.

“In recent days, I’ve heard troubling reports of ABC News employees recklessly dabbling in news,” Bob Iger told the gathering at ABC’s Manhattan headquarters. “This ends now.”

Declaring ABC News “a news-free zone,” he said, “If you find yourself tempted to do news, I want you to ask yourself: is it worth risking your career?”

Iger’s anti-news policy, however, drew a harsh rebuke from Fox News Channel, who claimed that ABC was infringing on its brand.

The Borowitz Report

Oh! Brother. Won't you give me one more chance?

"Oh! little brother

We are in a mess

Don't look at me that way

Don't put me to the test

When I first saw you

People said:

"He scrutinised a little monster"

And disappeared through red door

Now everyone is disinformation

Disinformation

Disinformation

He says:

"Won't you give me one more chance?"

"I'm not a communist"

Disinformation

Disinformation

Disinformation"

"Oh! Brother," The Fall (1984): Mark E. Smith (MES) at his most affable. Off Wonderful and Frightening World, Brix's first full album and also the last Fall album with two drummers. 

"League of Bald Headed Men," The Fall (1993): More of MES's semi-affable tip. Off Infotainment Scan, their highest charting album, graphically the worst Fall album, with a couple of standout covers, maybe a slight step back musically from the articulated tribalism, avant-primitivism, of their best work but MES's typically caustic lyrics are playfully sharp.  

"It's Not A Lie If You Believe It"

 

"Fear," Easy Going (1980)

Ever wondered why Pink Floyd never made a disco track? Everyone else did in the 1970s. Or one better or more than "Another Brick in the Wall," anyway. This 1980 Italo-disco workout might satisfy your curiosity. Easy Going are named after a gay club in Rome. They put out a handful of records between 1978 and 1980 and sound here like Floyd doing some robotic disco. No dance floor liftoff crescendos but a suitably hypnotic assembly line groove with some cutting edge 1980 electronic disco moves. 

Bonus track: A goofy and energetic spin on Giorgio Moroder's electro-disco. And another significant subgenre deposit of Italo-disco or Euro-disco early 1980s. Hyper bouncy chirping tempos and rolling TV show synth fanfare. I adore pop disco instrumentals. "Plastic Doll," Dharma (1982)

Militarist Imperialism vs Global Terrorist Networks vs the UN World Order

Some Knock-on Effects in Africa and the Middle East--

"Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate Russia from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources. Russia has become the biggest supplier of arms to the continent.

The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatens Russia’s ability to continue to operate in Africa. As Mike Eckel of Radio Free Europe explained on Monday, Russia launches most of its African operations from the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Their loss would hamstring those operations. Russian officials are trying to negotiate with the insurgents who overturned Assad’s regime in order to secure those bases as well as Russia’s other footholds in the country."

Letters from an American Historian

Already figured Assad's fall had something to do with Russia and Iran's lack of direct military support recently, both more preoccupied with military conflicts elsewhere, in Ukraine and Israel, but this account suggests regime change in Syria additionally might also reduce Russia using Syria as a launching pad for their mercenary military adventures in Africa. And, by the way, it's also more evidence of the collateral costs to Russia for invading Ukraine. Meanwhile, Israel is rushing to expand and solidify land grabs in Syria during the chaos of the transition. And everywhere, in the middle east anyway, the Islamists have been pushed back, if not bludgeoned into total disarray or mass humanitarian crises, and Netanyahu is posing for war hero photo shoots in a combat helmet, looking smug and ridiculous but triumphant. I don't know what all goes into peaceful coexistence but I'm pretty sure there are some crucial missing ingredients in the current situation. 

PJ Harvey: Big Complex Female Voice in a Slight Rock Star Package

Let's begin with "Joe," a Demo from 1992's Dry recordings. The vocal performance, so uncannily assured and unselfconscious, is one thing. Then the duet setting of her effortless vocal heaviness against the abstracted slabs of industrial grunge guitar gives the song demo a post-punk conceptual feel. She's a little package but a powerhouse voice and personality. And I'm not just trying to objectify her with that contrast. It seems integral to her power. Like Iggy Pop's "Five Foot One," the power in her voice taunts those that might underestimate her diminutive frame.  

Dinosaur riff rock gets stomped on and dominated by Ms. Harvey in one of her perhaps underrated periods. It's a boss performance in England in 1998 circa her album Is This Desire? 

"The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore," from 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, my running favorite Harvey album but I need to give some others more attention-Anyway, this number is an absolute rock & roll hall of fame grand salami of a rock single but, I just checked, it didn't chart and she's actually another one not in the official R&R Hall in Cleveland. (More of what's wrong with people and the authorities, I'm telling you!) Harvey doesn't have any big hits but her albums chart okay, a couple top tens. And her audience, or cult, if you prefer, is a sizable alt-rock audience and surely big enough for the Hall's consideration?! Maybe they're still trying to catch up with the '90s? I know how that goes but PJ Harvey is a historic rock star original and past due for serious consideration for recognition by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 

Also, by 2000's Stories..., note how in the song "Good Fortune" she's still doing her Smithian vocal stylings, my first critical hesitation with her music back in '92/'93, but now she's tossing this stuff off like she's dancing in the streets, like it ain't no thing. Or it's just another kind of art song style she does, no sweat. Patti gives Bruce "Because The Night." PJ gives a confident nod to Patti while maybe throwing in some Stevie Nicks for good measure. Masterful mistress of the late rock era. 

 More evidence: "When I'm On Ether," from 2007's White Chalk. If not psychedelic, a drug song masterpiece.  

Don't have time to get into it too much but I think Harvey is a tremendously rich source of evidence for the rockist argument. I.e., rock is essentially pop with an oppositional, iconoclastic, counter cultural, and/or anti-commercial streak built in. Its authenticity isn't rooted so much in class as in personality; its "wokeness" is a reflexive antagonism to straight authority. It's "alternative," by definition and in principle. Harvey's art insists on her individual identity while at the same time making use of various musical legacies and traditions. Progressive art song and heavy blues rock, for two. And she's part of a long line, if small club, of shamanistic rock stars with big vocal diva prowess. 

For heaven's sake, PJ Harvey belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame if ever there was or is such a thing?! Not that I have any idea whether or not she would appreciate the honor or even care. Hall of Fames are bs but if you're going to do bs why not show some judgement and try to make your bs count? 

Post-Punk Protest Music

"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," PJ Harvey (1991): 

"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." 

Actually, Harvey calls her song "Sheela-Na-Gig," after carved figurines of a naked woman with an exaggerated vulva, architectural grotesques found on cathedrals, castles, and other buildings throughout Europe in the middle ages. Love the esoteric feminist history but had to look it up, of course. I was originally slow on the uptake with Harvey when she first came out in the early 1990s. Both Dry ('92) and Rid of Me ('93) first struck me as too much like Patti Smith. That same melodramatic shamanistic banshee vocalizing thing. Which was such a rock snobby take, no doubt, but for the life of me now I can't hear what a fuss I was making. I mean, sure, there's a vocal styling resemblance but Harvey is way more Sturm und Drang, and way more intensely sexual. Being her own person, like Smith, the power in that, is what Harvey shares most with Smith. Don't try to pigeonhole them too much. They will arrive in their own time and on their own terms. Maybe Harvey was a little bit to the '90s what Smith was to the '70s, rockers, sui generis strong women art rockers. Salute. 

"Leave the Capitol," The Fall (1981): The Fall at an early peak; from The Slates EP. In a fitful nightmare I imagine Mark E. Smith taking down Grump in a battle rap royale, jabbing him with his rat a tat tat militant nonsense, dancing around the Fat Bastard spastically. Never being touched. The TKO'd G crumpling with Smith leering over him, pointing a finger at him, taunting him with the hook here, "Then you know in your brain/LEAVE THE CAPITOL!/EXIT THE ROMAN SHELL!" Over and over. The dream look is Clockwork Orange. No doubt the obtuse ranting lends itself to such fantasy because Smith is a little Trumpy; like one of Elvis Costello's "Two Little Hitlers." Apparently, the song is about Smith wanting to get out of London, to get away from the pop press hype. Post-punk revenge pop. 

(1988): 

"And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I'm yearning

To be done with all this measuring of proof.

An eye for an eye

And a tooth for a tooth

And anyway I told the truth

And I'm not afraid to die."

"It Ain't Over Til It's Over," Lenny Kravitz (1991)

All together now: 

"So many years we've tried 

To keep our love alive

So many tears we've cried

So much pain inside

But it ain't over til it's over"

Lenny Kravitz is a gorgeous hunky "rock star" model but I've always found his music a little too packaged and derivative to connect much with. And this song is no different in a way. It could easily be a rip-off of some precious soul hit from the early 1970s. Hearing this in the car on the radio recently, and not knowing who it was, I was half expecting the DJ to identify it as some chestnut off one of those wonderful Rhino Soul Hits of the 70s: Didn't It Blow Your Mind comps. Instead, it's Kravitz from his 1991 album Mama Said. And turns out as a single it reached number 2 on the charts, although I have no memory of ever hearing it before. But there is a big classic echo in it anyway? It reminds me of something: maybe EWF's "That's The Way of The World," which is song that ought to be emulated more, certainly. It's one of those old soul hits that makes me feel misty and sentimental as an almost involuntary response. Anyway, as a simple, boldly drawn soul workout I'm finding "It Ain't Over" irresistible today; 2024, USA, Earth. If you'd like the full rock star presentation there are alternate versions on youtube. I passed but had to share the song. TGIDF.   

"Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage," CNN post

"For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. 

Health-care workers [in 2018 study] account for seventy-three per cent of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. Nurses, residents, aides, specialists—they are asked to absorb the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system, whose private insurers generate billions of dollars in profit and pay executives eight figures not despite but because of the fact that they routinely deny care to desperate people in need.

Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?

He [Thompson, the UHC CEO] had sold more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.

A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient."

Jia Tolentino @ NY-er 

As a friend has pointed out denials of care function like "Death Panels," right?

Still, I'm stuck on the election postmortem angle. There are voters experiencing "the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system" that failed to notice Biden was actually trying to reel in price gouging in the health care industry with Lina Khan's FCC antitrust enforcement, mentioned in the second to last graph above, and implementing price controls on super expensive medicines?! Too abstract, not kitchen table enough? 

Or no one noticed that Grump has promised all along almost the exact opposite: threatening to reduce ACA health insurance coverage and end Biden's antitrust and reforms to the IRS. None of which has a remote chance of making health care more affordable for the working classes. 

Khan, for crying out loud, was probably more than anything else the real reason why billionaires signed on with Grump and are now filling his cabinet. They wanted to stop her and most voters, the working classes, had barely ever heard of her and probably support her anti-monopolist efforts. They know the business people don't like her, maybe. Elizabeth Warren was hazed like this ridiculously in the reform period after the 2008 housing collapse. 

To my point: If what you wanted out of the election was more affordable, humane, and available when you need it health care there was no choice but Harris/Walz. And the popular vote, admittedly razor thin, said nothing to see here. You know these disconnects between the election and what matters, health care, women's rights, living wage jobs, homelessness, climate change, world peace, civil rights, are going to pile up. 

And I can already see one thread of positive spin forming: Maybe some good can come from Grump's radical "disruption." Maybe; vacuums encourage initiative, sure. But I see Grump firing Khan and using antitrust as a way to shakedown monopolists, bringing them to heel and trying to mold them into an oligarchy backing his power. Yeah, I think the rule of Putin and Orban are his models, but Grump is mostly an impulsive blustery windbag of performative dominance in the spirit of professional wrestling on TV. In other words, he's escaped jail and might be satisfied with some splashy revenge TV spectacles. Clearly his personal powers are unstable and waning. 

So a lot of the fascismo revanchist technocratic reaction is going to come down to the energies of the miscreants behind him, Vance, Lusk, Miller, his appointments, who Grump is giving the "initiative" to, make no mistake, and then the resistance and resilience of federalist powers and half the popular vote to stop or reduce their stupidest stuff and worst humanitarian crimes. 

It's not exactly the pacific retirement plan I was contemplating but it will be certainly historic. Hang on and hang in there. 

Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment

"Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world."

Paul Krugman @ NY Times

Well, maybe money can't buy you love but it can, apparently, buy you an election, a POTUS, the most powerful elected official in the world, Lusk contributing over $250m to Grump's campaign, and which is way too much power to give to any spurned lover, I might add. 

Krugman is hanging it up at the NY Times. This is his last column. Way too much the apologist for mainstream economics for my tastes but one of the few on a mainstream media platform even willing to challenge out loud how the capital order-- voodoo economics, confidence fairy, zombie ideas, etc-- doesn't always add up. Those of us who care about economic and social justice will miss him. 

Hold the press: Krugman is retiring and jumping ship on the NY Times but reactivating a dormant substack account, which he's calling "Krugman wonks out," and in the first two posts at any rate, resemble more his longer wonking out posts at the Times, which get more into the numbers than his regular word-limited columns. 

This first post, very promising, does a post-by-post takedown of the DOGE's performative crusade against "waste, fraud, and abuse": 

Krugman wonks out @ substack

In sum: Half the problem with "Muskaswamy" (the Krugmeister has still got it, right?) is where they go in the federal budget actually isn't where the big money is and they don't even recognize what is actual federal spending and what is local spending, school teachers, police officers, and public health workers, budget items controlled by local governments. And the other half the problem with their so-called "budget analysis" is the excessive overhead in health care spending they call out, relative to health systems in other developed economies, is almost all attributable to private for profit insurers in the US, when of course a major goal of Muskaswamy is to privatize as much of the federal government as they can. Anyway, Krugman wonks out on the DOGE clown show. Check it out. 

Empire and Conservative Propaganda: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

 "In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election."

Letters from an American Historian

One obvious observation would be that a $787m defamation penalty, 3/4 of Billion dollars, charged to Fox was, apparently, an insufficient legal remedy if 70% of Republicans still believe the election was stolen from Grump. This resembles the prosecutions of Alex Jones and Steve Bannon in that they are convicted for defamations but don't stop the slanderous defamations, as they continue to broadcast from jail and stand on the stage at the Republican convention with Grump.  

As I've said before, Grump did not invent fake news but he is the triumph of fake news. A final triumph, a regime changing triumph, we don't know yet but they're going to try hard to make it stick over the next four years, at least, and further degradation of the legal system and major media will be high on their priorities list to achieving their goals. 

Maybe Fox will change course when Rupert dies as HCR explains, just as maybe the Republican party might when Grump finally goes, but I don't find much comfort in either prospect. They've already activated and networked millions devoted to destroying any promises of freedom and prosperity and enviornmental sustainability that doesn't guarantee their exclusive ethnonationalist privilege and power; as whites, Christian Nationalists, and capitalist bosses.  

Empires create their own reality. For instance, I saw a billboard in Oregon yesterday that read, "Your neighbor voted for him," sponsored by the "He Gets Us" campaign, thereby fusing Grump with Jesus. He's got you alright!

"Rudolph," MJ Lenderman (aka Jake), off the album, "Manning Fireworks," 2024

 Is Slacker rock like this vintage now or is it maybe eternal, Dad rock nostalgia, or a lingering bohemian fantasy of life without work or the hard un-fun kind of work anyway? When the first Slacker movie came out in '91 rents were still cheap, flop houses and flopping on couches plentiful enough, and squats were always around, so urbanites could get by with minimal work and maximum hanging out or 'slacking' to make their art or party or just hang out! In the 20th century, anyway, the arts thrived in the cities on the accessibility of cheap housing and relevantly decent paid work and/or maximum free time to make art, which, yes, a lot of times still looked like people just hanging out like slackers and partying. But do such slacker conditions even exist today? Rents are so high. MJ Lenderman, guitar, vocals, member of North Carolina standard bearing indie rockers, Wednesday, made the Number 1 record on my favorite NY-er music writer's Best Albums of 2024, and is why I'm here, basically. If nothing else, I'll be damned if MJL is not heroically still living out the slacker code in 2024 somehow someway one someday at a time. And let me tell you I've fallen for my share of records in the Slacker rock vein over the years: Sparklehorse. Waxahatchee. Courtney Barnett. Car Seat Headrest. Even a Bon Iver song! But rarely does the mopey slacker vibe alone make me a follower of these semi-industrious artists and their semi-pop music. What keeps me coming back in the following, "Rudolph," for example, is the alt-country riff-rock crescendoing guitar chorus that whips, momentarily, like a strong wind, the slacker longing and regret into something like catharsis, like a full-throated sing-along with some old friends, warm and familiar, if also sad and wistful. Tis the season for year-end record lists! Enjoy.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever," George Orwell, 1984

Some world history:

"The efficiency [effective state organization] of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way." 

Letters from an American Historian

P.S. If the rebels taking over Syria are hostile to Russia and Iran for backing Assad where will the new Syria be on Gaza and Israel? Will this inflame more violent unrest in the middle east or serve as a crack in a doorway to more peace and stability? 

Deregulation Hysteria Is Building Inside the Beltway

 Some republican legislator excited about Grump's support for deregulating the economy: 

“There may be more bang for the buck in terms of growing our economy…making regulatory changes, get the impediments out of the way, let those job creators and entrepreneurs really be able to go to work.”

Letters from an American Historian 

I liked Gary Gerstle's book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), especially the history stuff about the fall of the New Deal (1932-1979) period and the rise of Neoliberal period (1980 to when remains a question), but the "fall" of the neoliberal order in his book title still seemed a tad presumptuous even after finishing his argument. 

The recent election, for instance, was driven by revenge of the neoliberal order as much as it was culture war stupidity. Deregulatory hype like the above quote is Neolib reaction, pure and simple. They're back and never went away really.   

And how many times have we heard this one: if only we'd get taxes and regulations off the backs of our enterprising captains of industry they'd create all the jobs and wealth and prosperity America could ever possibly need. Free market or halcyon deregulated business conditions are hyped as this romantic Shangri-La fantasy forever frustrated by government meddling. But, we already know what big businesses, corporations, will in fact do when unfettered by government regulations. We have nearly two centuries of evidence of what they do, actually. 

We know what the free marketeers do when unregulated: 1) Big business interests will peddle products that are dangerous, poisonous, and addictive if not regulated. 2) Big employers will squeeze labor to the last drop, enslave workers if possible, and work children and adults for less than living wages, and then have the gall to construct an ideology out of these practices that contends that their business success and productive "efficiencies" depend on disciplining labor like this, most of whom would fall into lazy waste without the order their jobs provide. And 3) As much as they can get away with, large corporations have always "externalized" the expenses of doing business, their costs of production, pushing carbon emissions and other pollutants onto the community or public commons openly or if need be they will take extraordinary measures to dump their wastes into the environment to avoid the expense of disposing of them safely. Again, unless regulated this is what many so-called free market businesses will do and have been doing for 150 years routinely. 

The free market dogma has gotten so bad of late that the billionaires and oligarchy are opposing green energy innovations and obstructing economic reforms with that old saw about how saving the planet is bad for the economy. One imagines making the planet uninhabitable won't be very good for the economy either. 

Anyway, we do know what big corporations and private equity firms do when deregulated: they lowball and chisel labor, breaking unions, off-shoring labor, whatever they have to do, understaff and overstretch their frontline workers, externalize all the costs they can, and then skim off as much as they can in profits for as long as they can, and then sell off their remaining assets for parts. And just like they've never seen a tax or regulation they like, the profit margins from this process, their take, is never enough, of course. This go-go yuppie sales hustle hype is always in pursuit of the next bull market bubble and will most likely fizzle with a bunch of stock buybacks or another crypto bubble meltdown. 

It's in the government's interest to increase commercial activity but not to leave the foxes guarding the henhouse. From a macro economic standpoint it's evident at this point that the neoliberal order isn't so much pro economic growth as it is class war redistribution and pro-billionaire wealth hoarding. If the richies had a pound of sense they'd be leaning hard into economic development in a green energy transition and pay living wages. But they don't. 

And if nothing else, maybe this assassination of a healthcare CEO, I read today they found a backpack, presumably owned by the gunman, full of Monopoly money (not kidding), might give some sobering pause to the austerity Hawks lining up to turn the screws on health care and other essential services crucial to big super-majorities of the population. 

Stay tuned. 

 

Another postmortem!

"Strange Town," The Groundhogs (1970) and The Fall (2008)

John Lee Hooker's favorite backing band when he toured England in the 1960s. The Groundhogs. Another one of those Top Ten British bands, like Hawkwind, The Pretty Things, The Jam, that never won the same kind of success in the US. They were not played on the classic rock radio I listened to on the West Coast, for instance, although they absolutely perfectly fit the classic rock radio format. Tony McPhee another guitar god with the tasty rhythm riffing blues licks. Folkie interludes abound but full-on maximum r&b pounding and stomping jamrock when it counts. Biker gang cousins to Derek and the Dominos, who were all over classic rock radio. You go for any of this sort of music, blues rock, progressive rock, classic rock radio from the 1970s and 1980s on the harder edged garage rock side you will love their '71 album, Thank Christ For The Bomb (right, the sacrilege probably didn't help their cause in US markets). Not to be missed, anyway. Underrated classic rock album great. Although, if you must forgo the full album experience, "Strange Town" is the peak. The song. 

And here's Mark E. Smith, The Fall, being a Groundhogs' "copyist" (as he once said of Pavement, mere "Fall copyists"). And almost four decades later, 2008, Smith sounds drunk, slurring his way through his crank paranoia. It's a "Strangetown," everyone is so glum. He turns the hippie rock into an abstracted studio pop punk noir. A tight edgy riff rock rhythm with a few space rock sound effects. It scales down the original, gives it that Smithian (Mancunian?) bleak, scrappy Fall twist and demonstrates, again, Smith could still sometimes push the right buttons. At age fifty.                         

"Violence Grows," Fatal Microbes (1979)

 

"They've seen too much and don't want to know/Violence grows/Violence grows/Violence grows." Brit punk rockers writing their own rules. Honey Bane on the mic. Boosted by John Peel. Edgy and timeless. 

How Angry is America?

“If we desire respect for the law,” said Louis Brandeis, “we must first make the law respectable.” (1916)

"Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati told the New York Times there’s an issue. “There’s a latent undercurrent here of how frustrated people are with the health care industry,” he said. “I’m not condoning the action in any way, but there’s a lot of soul-searching we have to do about an industry that consumes nearly 20 percent of our G.D.P. and yet our outcomes are not nearly as good as countries that spend half as much.”

"Societies that give citizens no way to control their own lives, but put the fate of their people in the hands of distant masters with no concern at all for their wellbeing, invite disaster. We’ve always known that. It’s one of the main reasons for the passage of our antitrust laws. So I hope we can get some control over our society again, before we truly do spin out of control."

Matt Stoller @ BIG

SCOTUS, the Robert's Court, has undermined respect for the law. A judiciary and police that protects the most litigated, lawbreaking potus and major political party in American history undermines respect for the law. Monopolist billionaires partying it up while millions struggle with health care bankruptcies undermines respect for the law. Biden pardoning his son only acknowledges that our democratic system just elected a new admin that does not respect the rule of law, but in fact openly encourages violence and phony prosecutions against its political enemies. 

The Hartmann Report on The Medicare Advantage Trap

I remain somewhat uncertain about this Medicare Advantage Trap. I recently signed up for Medicare Advantage with Kaiser, basically, because I've been with Kaiser (and Group Health before they became Kaiser) through my work for going on forty years. I don't yet, knock on wood, need health care much and after looking around a little I decided to go with what I already knew and, yeah, I liked that I could get everything I needed (health, dental, vision) in one place. 

My parents, whose affairs I've managed for last few years, are a very different story. They're in the original Medicare system. In addition to Medicare they have to carry Medigap plans that cost them $300-400 a month each. And they have additional insurance to supplement coverage of their medications. They're in their late 80s and at this point require 24/7 care support.  

I don't doubt they might be denied more health care services if they were on Medicare Advantage but all this coverage they already have still does deny them services on occasion. Hartmann reports that on average 18% of health care services are denied by Medicare Advantage plans. United Healthcare, the plan ran by the CEO recently murdered, reportedly, denied 30% of the health care services submitted to them for support. I take some comfort that the denial of services rates lists Kaiser at 7%, the lowest denial rate on the list Hartmann shares, but I still wonder what is the real denial of service rate in the old Medicare? It's not zero, or not in my experience anyway. 

And the old system is in fact ridiculously complicated and wasteful. The original Medicare probably doesn't allow as much of the exorbitant CEO and private for profit equity skimming that Hartmann describes going on with Medicate Advantage. But once you're involved in the health care system, the Medicare and Medicaid systems, I must say it's obvious that there are lots of "termite"-like price gouging going on inside these insurance systems, hospital care and specialty services charging inflated rates to insurance plans and routine understaffing of care workers. It is a flashing red alert to me that recent nursing strikes don't mention underpay as much as understaffing levels that endanger patient care. 

I definitely don't think increasing profit seeking in health care, which the private equity people like to euphemize as "choice," is the solution. Reducing it is closer to the real task confronting the health care economy in the future. And Medicare Advantage is a privatizing move, private industry trying to secure control of more public monies. But I'm not sure it's this public vs private binary either. I like the idea of Medicare-for-all, build universal health care into the tax base, no co-pays for basic health care services, but that would still by necessity include lots of private enterprise, and would have to be heavily regulated to squeeze out as much of the termite price gouging as possible. 

But, most emphatically, I don't think cutting Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid would solve any of our health care problems either. Look around, senior poverty is a thing. My parents would now be destitute and homeless without Medicaid supports, point of fact. And I have no doubt cutting any of these crucial supports would mean more destitution and homelessness, for the working classes, I might add, that worked hard their whole damn lives paying taxes into these programs expecting them to be there when they needed them.  

Cutting these programs will not make the law or government more respectable. It will make them less so. But this appears to be where we're at. It's that line, again, about how "the Republicans are the party that insists the government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it." Seventy-seven million Americans voted for forced deportations, sadly, but I'm fairly certain they did not vote for cutting their own health care and Social Security?! 

And doing so, obviously, won't stop random vigilante violence against health care CEOs. 

The Tony Soprano Syndrome and the Rage of Deaths of Despair

 "We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents

Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”

Adam Serwer @ The Atlantic 

Reminds me of this early '90s paleo-conservative big think piece I recently read about portraying The Godfather film trilogy as an epic story of "Geimenschaft" (family and community) making a last stand against "Gesellschaft" (society and impersonal bureaucratic rules). Really? And here I thought it was something about how family businesses based on criminal violence end in destruction of the family and the fraticidal paranoia and isolation that results?! Any victory for family in The Godfather is at best pyrrhic or tragic, suggesting that assimilation, wealth and success, Gesellschaft, requires the ultimate destruction of Geimenschaft bonds, or that's my distant memory of those films anyway. What strikes me here isn't how republicans get the Tony Soprano story wrong, mistaking bad guys for good guys, so much as they recognize Tony Soprano and Grump as bad guys but identify with them as bad guys, outlaws, fighting for a noble cause, family, America, Christian Nationalism, or non-liberal elites like them, and might even recognize this conflict as more or less a lost cause but identify most with the macho nobility of the idea of not going out without a fight. It's falling on your sword machismo, basically. This is how they delude themselves about their own selfish toxic masculinity. And this is the animus that will drive the revenge of Grump 2. Deaths of despair revenge aided and abetted by corporate elite panic about coming antitrust and democratic reforms. Any credible or effective opposition will be people who believe in a future talking people who don't off the ledge or coaxing them into putting down their guns. And then people making the clear case for how we get to a better future. It's going to be exhausting. 

Serwer is The Cruelty is the Point guy. One of our most insightful critics of the Grump Era. 

Hip-hop is the genre where men come to terms with their mothers

"The rollercoaster saga of Eminem and Debbie exemplifies the way in which hip-hop is perhaps surprisingly rich with empathetic songs about struggling mothers. Even when artists reveal difficult truths – like Biggie sharing his mom’s cancer diagnosis with the world on Suicidal Thoughts, or underground hero Boldy James complaining of being neglected by the woman of the house on Mommy Dearest – it tends to culminate in a moment that reveals a touching respect, or the mending of a broken relationship.

It’s the genre where working class men come to grapple with complex relationships with the women who gave birth to them – like Debbie and Marshall Mathers. While the road might be rocky and painful memories are likely to be excavated, rappers (and by extension their fans, who feel “seen” by the lyrics) that immortalise their mothers in music tend to walk away with much lighter shoulders."

Thomas Hobbs @ The Guardian

One of only a few rap songs preserved in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress: "Dear Mama," 2Pac (1995) 

The Pop Group and Mark Stewart's Agitprop Post-Punk Funk

"The Pop Group has this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything,"  once said Vivien Goldman, journalist, member of The Flying Lizards, and Chrissie Hynde's NME London flatmate in the late '70s.

The Pop Group were the first post-punk band or in that conversation, anyway. On paper they were irresistible, for their hilariously blunt agitprop titles alone: Learning to Cope with Cowardice; As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They were also very into Black music; members eventually formed relationships with On-U-Sound records that has lasted into the 21st century; a label devoted to reggae and dub and related beat music. In the burgeoning punk era British pop press of the late 1970s The Pop Group were a prototype post-punk band. So hot they were on the cover of NME before they even had a record.

And Mark Stewart's voice is the unmistakeable calling card of The Pop Group and Stewart's subsequent outfit, Mark Stewart & the Maffia, and in its loutish way a punk rock monument in its own right. Like a drunken pirate, inflamed with bitter lamentation. Like a 17th century ranter or 19th century romantic poet, caterwauling against the void. Stewart's maybe too smart and didactic and political for a goth icon but he carries on in gothic histrionics anyway. He grabs your attention, whether you like it or not. He'd probably make a great street corner preacher if he wasn't such an angry humanist. He often wails through a bullhorn like a street preacher, even if you'd have to really play close attention to make out much of what he is howling or muttering about. 

Which is part of his achievement, turning his tuneless warble into this big scenery-chewing personality, apoplectic about the human surrender to entropy and passivity, or the placid indifference to the poly-crises raging all around us. Stewart is not having any of it and has some things to say. 

In your face vocals are a common if not universal feature of punk rock singing, of course. And by such criteria alone Stewart is on a very short list of great punk rock singers. But, it should be noted for the same reasons, this makes anything with Stewart's voice impossible to listen to as background music, how I must admit I do most my music listening anymore. The dude will not blend into the music; or tends to "dominate the frame," is how producer Dennis Bovell once put it. 

But in small doses, songs, Stewart's hectoring, shamanistic and dramatically delirious spells are cast; "We Are Time," "Where There's a Will There's a Way," "She's Beyond Good and Evil," etc. And maybe contrary to what you might expect from such a big personality Stewart is actually into the collaboration and band thing. I've never had a full blown crush on any Stewart album but there are times when nothing quite hits the spot like one of Stewart's dub-heavy funky free-jazz political jeremiads. 

And this be, I'm afraid, one of those times. 

A live record of The Pop Group from the '00s is titled "Idealists in Distress from Bristol." Mark Stewart is an idealist in distress and a post-punk original. 

"Rob a Bank" (1980): Robin Hood as Punk Rocker. 

"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (1980): Punk-funk, post-punk, perverted disco, etc.  

"I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," William Blake.

Mark Stewart and the Maffia's version:

 

Grump Blasts Biden for Issuing Pardon Without Being Paid For It

"PALM BEACH—In a series of scathing Truth Social posts on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump lambasted President Biden for issuing a pardon without being paid for it.

“Pardoning someone for free was an incredibly selfish act,” Trump wrote. “This will lower the market value of every future pardon I give.”

“The framers of the Constitution gave the president pardon power for one reason: to make money,” Trump continued. “I have too much respect for the Constitution to pardon people for free.”

In perhaps his strongest denunciation of Biden’s actions, he added, “Any decent father would have made Hunter ambassador to France.” 

The Borowitz Report 

Nice response to journalists crowing about how Biden pardoning his son justifies Grump pardoning the Jan 6 perps. The journalistic "bothsidesing" in the election was always predicated on making these kind of preposterous comparisons; Jan 6 was justified payback for the BLM protests, etc. 

Biden was right to pardon his son simply to spare him further persecution by Grump's weaponization of the government against his political enemies, which he did 2016-2020 and promises to do in his second term, only worse. And doing so really isn't proof, like some want to suggest, that Jan 6 or stealing national security documents or conspiring to change the outcome of the '20 election were partisan attacks as much as scuttling their prosecution before the '24 election is absolutely proof that republican packing and weaponizing of SCOTUS isn't a threat but for all practical purposes already a done deal. 

I only say "for all practical purposes" because we don't know how far SCOTUS will let this go. We only know they already let it go too far.

And it's more evidence, unfortunately, that the media in a vain effort to stay relevant will bend over backwards to accommodate Grump's fake news frame. Grump pardoned Manafort and Stone for their crimes related to the 2016 election, for just two instances. (There are many more!) Biden pardoned his son for buying a gun while lying about his drug addictions. No treason or election interference. And not comparable but the NY Times hasn't figured this out.

Or what about the nepotism angle? Grump pardoned his son-in-law's father, guilty of big financial fraud, in his first term and named him ambassador to France for his second term. Biden is trying to spare his son being persecuted for the next four years for his, Joe's, political ambitions. Seems compassionate to me, and a principle he ought to extend to other obvious targets of Grump's illiberal wrath. 

Democracy does depend on voters being able to discern basic differences. Crooked Hilary was never as crooked as Grump, the Biden Crime Family was never as criminal as Grump's, by orders of magnitude. The failure to recognize this obvious distinction, as in the election, jeopardizes the American democratic experiment.   

Why "They" Lost

"In 2008, when Obama won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that 62 percent of voters who said they were dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. In 2024, when Trump won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that, again, 62 percent of voters dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. Even against an opponent carrying as much baggage as Trump, the Harris campaign was never able to overcome the axiomatic principle of presidential elections: When one party sinks in the public’s esteem, the other rises."

Ronald Brownstein @ The Atlantic

So, again, it's the economy, stupid. Longtime elections analyst, Ronald Brownstein, sorts the data available so far and has a long debrief with the Harris/Walz campaign strategists. Biden/Harris were unpopular, associated by the many with the post-pandemic inflation and rising costs of living, and this axiomatic principle overrode any misgivings the electorate might have had about Grump. 

Okay, but if the real economic factors, beyond Covid, most responsible for the recent rise in the cost of living were actually republican-leaning corporate price gouging and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates (with the stated intention of imposing "economic pain" on wage workers), not really Biden or the Dems, doesn't that make this axiom of elections a kind of heads-we-win-tails-you-lose proposition for republicans running the economy? At the very least it puts partisan republican interests in a position to extort the electorate. 

This dynamic might not be entirely operable without the cover of a pandemic or war or some other big global disruption to trade and normal economic global exchange but we face no shortage of such events, right? And we just came out of one. And, most importantly, if this axiom is so strong that it can override concerns like violent attempts to overthrow the government and treasonous collusion with hostile foreign dictators then we got bigger problems than the price of gas, I'm here to tell you. 

Anyway, I actually like the idea that the number one responsibility for any government, or administration, should be to stabilize prices and sustain a reasonably affordable cost of living for the many, the working classes and wage workers. There's a norm I can get behind. Good idea. Let's do that. But if you're going to do that then you have to give the gov the ability to do that and not leave it in the hands of those, big corporations and Wall Street, who would rather the gov have nothing to do with prices and interest rates or, as partisan Republicans, would like incumbent Dems to be blamed for inflation and the rising costs of living.  

This election was made possible by a disastrous alliance of billionaires and violent bigots in the republican party. When they screw up the economy and they surely will-- Lusk is already talking about cutting trillions in social benefits essential to the working classes-- then we hope the ironclad political economic axiom prevailing in '24 still holds but don't be surprised if the culture war against whoever-- immigrants, women's rights, LGBTQ, Muslims, liberals-- doesn't become, again, a paramount national emergency requiring more austerity and sacrifice from the working classes. 

 But Grump will most likely be able to lower the price of gas, or for awhile anyway. So no-college wage workers have sold out for the price of gas, again.