I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get most of the bailout money back — because, you know, how could we not? — but he notes that the Fed has ponied up $800 billion in good loans to bad banks, with more to come. Add that to the $750 billion of the Congressional bailout package, which Leonhardt acknowledges is only the beginning of that particular action, and we’re already up to $1.5 trillion without even having scratched what really itches.

My estimate was $3.5 trillion, or a shade more than the current US budget (a figure Leonhardt was kind enough to supply). Leonhardt’s problem is that despite everything, he’s prepared to believe what Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, who have been wrong about most everything and who were appointed by the Bush administration, say.

I’m sorry: did I miss something? Has anyone in that administration said anything that turned out to be true or accurate? Is there some reason to think they’ve recently reformed themselves?

Leonhardt’s advice is to not worry overmuch about the bailout, and focus instead on the runaway cost of health care. Well, okay, but why? It isn’t as though anyone will actually do anything about it. McCain would make the situation worse, Obama will simply make it different and it will remain an embarrassment among civilized nations, if anyone here had the sense to be embarrassed. The bailout money is a different deal: it’ll be a movie one of these days, because everyone can understand, at least in retrospect, the mother of all heists. But hey: look over there! Health care!

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There are, to be sure, stark differences between Barack Obama and George Bush. Obama has a pretty good jump shot, for one. And he’s never formally been a cheerleader. It turns out they they have more in common than one might think, and in the unlikely territory of social philosophy.

Back in February of 2005, Bush was out on the Nebraska leg of his Let’s Nuke Social Security” tour. At a stop in Omaha, he had an encounter with a woman called Mary Mornin (it’s Mornin in America!). During the course of their brief and breezy conversation, Mrs. Mornin mentioned that she worked three jobs to make ends meet for her family. Bush responded in classic fashion.

That’s great! No sleep, never sees her kids … man, that’s livin’.

No Obama, without even the excuse of being personally confronted with someone who is struggling fiercely to get under conditions made worse by his own policies, has joined in on the praise of Americans who have to work two or more jobs to get by. In a speech that either was or will be delivered in Ohio, which isn’t registering real well on the employment-o-meter at the moment, Obama has this to say.

While other countries have talented, productive workers who don’t fucking have to work two or three jobs, and can take a month off every year, because their countries have national health insurance, rent control and a social safety net that actually works.

Maybe some people are working two or three jobs to pay for that something extra for the kids, but the ones I knew, when I was hanging around with working people, were working to pay for little luxuries like the mortgage or rent, the utilities, the medical bills they racked up on account of no insurance, food … little things like that.

Somehow, some Americans, apparently including Obama, have come to believe that toiling every waking hour, usually at jobs which offer no benefits and pay poorly (or you wouldn’t, like, need three of them) to make ends meet is somehow a good thing. It isn’t. It straitens the victims’ circumstances, steals their families from them, dulls their minds and assaults their bodies. There is a ton of research on the impact of absent parents, on the effects of inadequate sleep, on the emotional and physical damage done by too little leisure time.

Far from representing the triumph of American spirit, someone who has to work two or three crappy jobs to get by, or to improve the lot of their kids, is getting seriously, royally, fiercely screwed. And Obama is, apparently, all for it. But he can rain three-pointers on you.

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As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.

It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage of every federal legislative budget appropriation for graft. Americans prefer to call it “waste,” but basically it’s accepted that a piece of every legislative pie gets stolen. Maybe it’s 10%, maybe more, maybe less. We’ll say 10% because that’s easy to work with. Cynics would therefore expect that at least $75 billion of the banks/Wall Street bailout money will be “wasted.”

Well, the cynics are wrong; they’re thinking too small. For perhaps the first time in US history, every penny of a multi-billion dollar appropriation is earmarked for theft. The reason we mention the Soviet Union is that the entire empire got stolen when it was taken private, and we may very well be topping the dollar value of those stolen assets with the $750 billion theft underway as we speak; it’s almost certain we will by the time the bailout ends, a few years and a few trillion dollars from now.

Although we haven’t kept as current on the crisis nor the anti-solution to it as we should have, we know enough to 1) preserve our flawless record of accurately predicting that whatever you think is happening, the reality will be revealed to be worse in a day or two, and 2) say with considerable confidence that when Congress appropriates taxpayer money to give to Congress’s friends and bedfellows without returning anything to taxpayers beyond a fistful of promises and platitudes, that there is a theft.

There are different levels of thievery involved. One might describe the bailout in full as a meta-theft, containing multitudes of opportunities for ordinary, if very sizeable, thefts of the sort we expect from programs like this — just people stealing large but comprehensible amounts of money. That latter is the 10%, the $75 billion that crooks have been salivating over while managing to keep straight faces on TV and on the phone with reporters. A very clever crook could become a billionaire behind all this.

The comparison to the selloff of Soviet assets has to have occurred to someone. For free marketeers, it must have rankled that the Russian oligarchs made out so well on what was essentially a western-conceived deal. Now’s their chance to run a considerably more elegant scam, with little bloodshed, against a much bigger mark. No one sins like the self-righteous, and no one puts your money so freely on the line, or doubles down quicker — they know that god’s on their side.

Maybe a few people in Congress genuinely think the bailout isn’t a scam, but there can’t be anyone who hasn’t thought about it. And yet here we are, with both major presidential candidates and majorities of both parties supporting the principle of the thing as they haggle over the precise details.

They know, boys and girls, and yet they’re doing it anyway. Here we have a situation wherein a bunch of crooks inside and outside government blew up the world, and to punish them we’re giving them a trillion dollars with no strings attached. That doesn’t actually make sense, but the people being ridiculed are the ones standing up to say that it doesn’t make sense. And the press wonder how they miss the big stories.

And be not mistaken: this is a very big story, but for reasons that aren’t at all part of the narrative except in, we modestly report, places like this one. Theft and abuse of power on scales that intimidate; that’s the story. Keep an eye out for it between the lines, which is often the only place worth reading.

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It’s been a month now since I stopped smoking. While I insist on preserving the option of becoming insufferable about it, I haven’t exercised it yet.

My motivation for quitting was aggravation and cost. I still enjoyed smoking, and presume that I would now if I started again; the problem was that I couldn’t enjoy it in peace. Before I could take that first, deep wonderful pull when I lit up, someone would be along to bum a cigarette. I couldn’t get a minute’s peace; the relaxation that was the whole point of the exercise was simply not to be had; I finished the cigarette more tense and aggravated than I was when I started it; I was spending $100 a month, which I don’t have, to make myself miserable.

So I quit. It worked wonders. I still got the occasional request/demand for a smoke, but I was so smug and aggressive in my response, which was, more or less, “I quit, you bastard, so go plague someone else,” that people stopped asking in relatively short order even though I still spent a fair amount of time in prime panhandling territory.

The peace of mind factor was important in helping me stay stopped, but it alone wasn’t enough. I don’t think I could have done it without the help of the UCLA med students who ran the smoking cessation class to which I turned in the first instance, and who provided me both with the nicotine patches that helped me cut my pack a day habit down to the point where I felt close enough to quitting to quit, and the mp3 player with the anti-smoking self-hypnosis track that has rendered me curiously incapable of asking for a cigarette.

Another important factor was my mantra, which I repeated every time I felt tempted: “The smoking lamp is now extinguished.” This is a reference to the light that used to signal whether or not smoking was permitted on airliners. During takeoff and landing, the lamp was off; in flight, it was on. We had stewardesses back in those days, who would announce that the captain had lit or extinguished the smoking lamp, as the case was.

“The smoking lamp is now extinguished” has a pretty faithful iambic beat and if one wasn’t me, one could dance to it. It’s easy to remember. I was proud of it. I told the UCLA medical students about it. They returned the most scarily blank expressions I’ve seen in years in response to something I said. I felt like the most enormous fool explaining myself. One of them said, “Oh, I’ve heard about that.” Lord.

I still use the mantra but it’s sullied now; I can’t think it’s as effective as it was when I first deployed it, but neither can I think of something to replace it, and of course I’m very fond of it since it helped get me off the demon weed. I’m open to suggestions for replacements or the sorts of modifications that might help the young folk understand the premise without lengthy explanation.

Meanwhile, I have grown very fond of my Junior League compilation CD. I listen to it and never once must I think about the smoking lamp. I do worry about the recipient’s expectation that the disc will reveal something of me, which I suppose would be, based upon track selection, that I’m a demented guitar lover with an extraordinarily bent conception of romance. But it’s not about me, damnit.

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I have lived in Los Angeles for a very short time, most of that in Santa Monica, which likes to think it isn’t LA. In that short time, I have not actually learned to love LA, partly because I haven’t seen that much of it and partly because in almost every respect, Southern California compares very poorly with the territory whence I came, that being Hawaii. Hawaii’s weather is better, Hawaii hardly ever has earthquakes — one significant one in the 15 years I was there, as opposed to one significant one in the 6 months I’ve been in LA — Hawaii does not exist courtesy of stealing other people’s water, Hawaii has mango trees in the back yard, Hawaii has an ocean that is swimmable year round by virtue of both temperature and low inimical bateria counts (barring the very rare massive sewage disaster), neither of which can be said of many California beaches. And so on.

However. Never in a million miles on a Hawaii bus would I see what I saw on the #5 Big Blue Bus in LA yesterday, which is one 40-ish woman taking a seat next to another 40-ish woman and, after a few minutes of riding in silence, with occasional curious glances thrown at the book 40-ish woman #1 was reading, asking her if she was a Christian Buddhist too, and then, after an affirmative response, spending the rest of the ride — the part I witnessed, anyway — discussing the perils of Christian Buddhism. The perils apparently and unsurprisingly consist mostly of Christians and Buddhists decrying the inclusion of the other religion in the mix.

I have no idea how many Christian Buddhists there are in, say, Honolulu, but I’m fairly certain that they all know one another and accordingly wouldn’t be entertaining strangers on the bus.

So chalk one up to Los Angeles. I’m also fairly certain that I would like the city more if 1) I had some money and 2) it didn’t take so extravagantly long to get from where I am to anywhere I really want to be, which at this point isn’t anywhere that isn’t free. Wherever that is, it’s at least an hour away. But the city will be hard pressed to overcome my prejudices on the weather, ocean, water and earthquake fronts.

Not that the city or any of its umpteen million residents will, you know, give a shit.

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The press are beginning to notice that they didn’t notice the flames lapping at the financial nation’s ankles these past several years. This is something of a ritual; and a bit of a peculiar one at that, since newspapers have always been much better at reporting what has already happened than what is about to, and have the attention span of goldfish. The exception is war, which hardly ever catches the papers by surprise.

But we digress. Marcus Brauchli, once a Wall Street Journal honcho and now the Washington Post’s executive editor, offered his regrets on the subject to Howard Kurtz, widely known as the most forgiving press critic in the business, saying that the stories he didn’t assign and which might have prefigured our little difficulty involved “really difficult issues to convey to a popular audience.”

In other words, the lack of coverage is mostly your fault for being too stupid to understand the highly technical circumstance of banks and other financial institions drowning in their own crap, had Mr. Brauchli’s newspapers mentioned it. In fact the whole crisis is your fault, as will be the depression that results from your potential failure to keep shopping. Speaking of which, that depression will be needing a name. “Great” is taken. Thoughts? “Percy?”

‘Tis the season for Kurz’s forgiveness to get a real workout; it’s almost time to begin the end-of-year self-flagellation parties, where journalists get together on panels, most of which are hosted by Kurz, who works for 18 press outlets, and decide which among the stories they missed or blew warrant corporal punishment. But they never actually get to the spanking, only the tearful forgiveness part, and then they go forth and do it all over again.

This year the lead screwup will of course be the failure to cover the impending crash. Since they’re still failing utterly to get ahead of the story, it’s quite likely that next year’s lead screwup will be the same thing. We might want to hope that there’s nothing more noteworthy on the horizon that they’re not covering because, as Mr. Brauchli complains, reportering and editoring is hard work.

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Speaking of the Junior League … it may well be the downturn in shopping by consumers whose ears are bleeding from the din of credit card creditors calling night and day that turns what is now termed a “steep recession” into something that everyone can recognize for what it is, which would be a great damned depression slavering down on us. Junior Leaguers could be our salvation, since they’re generally well heeled with a fair amount of disposable time.

Lots of people are throwing around comparisons to the Great Depression, as in “the most serious downturn since” it. That says a lot about how well the government has done at managing the economy since World War II even faced as it is with free market zealots, who the last thing they want are actual free markets, and their pet politicians. The most common reason that people keep bringing up the Great Depression is to sell things like the Great Bailout, which will, as we have repeatedly said, be a whole lot greater than the paltry $.75 trillion that just passed ($3.5 trillion is about right.)

But even the mother of all bailouts, and its mother, will not keep us out of a Great Depression if you, dear sap, quit shopping. When George Bush told everyone to go shopping after 911, he knew what he was doing, or whoever told him to say it knew what they were doing. It was the failure of consumers to keep shopping until their ears bled that pitched the 1930’s depression from “pretty damn good” to “Great.” They didn’t want to borrow money because it began to look as though jobs could become scarce, which of course they did, so not shopping was a pretty good move on the one hand, but one that strangled a bunch of businesses and banks that were already gasping, on the other.

We don’t want to see that, so the imperative is to keep people like you out and about, or online, with your credit cards in hand and a look of grim purpose on your face. You’re not going to spend as much on credit if banks make credit less accessible, so that’s why in addition to buying a bunch of material goods you don’t need, you’re also buying a bunch of banks and insurance companies you don’t need; you’re giving them a whole bunch of money so that they can lend it back to you so that you can spend it and prop up the economy. It’s the free market, baby! Free to everyone but you, anyway.

And you’re getting a lot for your money with these banks and other owners of “distressed financial instruments”: they come pre-owned, broken and without warranties of any kind except the one that says you have to keep shoveling money at them. Lucky you! Instead of a nest egg, you’re stuck with a whole flock of those birds that push your eggs out and replace them with theirs and somehow you wind up feeding them because you don’t know any better.

It’s somewhat unfortunate that shoppers come in all shapes and sizes and political bents, because a national shoppers’ strike on behalf of a particular policy would be a sure thing at the moment. While it’s unlikely that enough shoppers could be rallied behind, say, single-payer universal national health coverage to push it through, perhaps a strike on behalf of inchoate rage would yet be worthwhile.

Mostly though, Americans should remember that if a depression does arrive, it’s up to us to make it great: no second-rate efforts here, thank you very much.

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A Bridge of Years, by Robert Charles Wilson
Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Science fiction, almost by definition, takes place in the realm of the odd, using any number of tricks and speculations with the setting. And it’s enjoyable enough, but it’s only part of the story. Action stories and geeky masturbation have given the genre a certain reputation, but it’s a great vehicle to look at people too. Robert Charles Wilson and Lucius Shepard are two authors that will take science fictional props and use them as tools to delve into the sensitive realm of spirit, telling astute human dramas rather than just blowing stuff up with ray guns. Wilson is one of my favorites: he can consistently put human nature up against a vast weird universe and make me come out caring. Shepard’s no slouch here either, but in Life During Wartime it’s as if he couldn’t decide to go with science fiction or magic realism, short fiction or long, and the choices didn’t quite work out. We can put Watchmen (soon to be a major motion picture!) under this umbrella too: it similarly brings comic book fantasy down to a realisitic human scale, and is the poster child for comics as literature. If superhero realism has been done to death since, Watchmen is still one of the first, and maybe the best.

Continue Reading »

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It’s a story that would easily fit on these pages, so I won’t call it long, just private. The conclusion to it is me making a CD for someone I met through the Junior League of Los Angeles. If you know me, and you know the Junior League, you will know as well how utterly fricken unlikely that is. It is, however, what it is, and onward we go; this is a pop CD, the goal of which was contrapuntal.

I will now offer a shoutout to Tegan and Sara fans in advance because they seem to ferret out any reference, however glancing, to the duo. Yo. Your girls are in good company here.

All but five of these tunes are the product of my recent dive into the Santa Monica library collection.

01. “The Kind” - Steve Earle
02. “Da Doo Ron Ron” - Dave Edmunds
03. “Hello My Baby” - Ladysmith Black Mambazo
04. “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s A Doll Revolution)” - The Bangles
05. “Extraordinary Machine” - Fiona Apple
06. “Color Me Impressed” - The Replacements
07. “Yanqui Go Home” - Camper Van Beethoven
08. “Been It” - The Cardigans
09. “Burn Down This Town” - Rosanne Cash
10. “Let’s Move to the Country” - (Smog)
11. “Yankee Go Home” - Richard Thompson
12. “Something Familiar” - Curve
13. “Wolf at the Door” - Patty Larkin
14. “Chuco’s Cumbia” - Los Lobos
15. “Worms” - Beth Orton
16. “Time Running” - Tegan and Sara
17. “That Old Sweet Roll (Hi-De-Ho)” - Dusty Springfield
18. “Happy Trails” - Quicksilver Messenger Service

A few comments: the Bangles tune was written by Elvis Costello; yes, it’s really Dave Edmunds doing “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and it’s good; Zap Mama contributes to the Ladysmith tune, and that’s a good thing; Curve’s “Something Familiar” is at the moment vying with the Los Lobos tune as my favorite of the collection; Dusty Springfield does a hell of a rendition of “Hi-De-Ho.”

And finally, even though I know for a fact that I am vastly underrating the collective behavioral range of the Junior Leaguers, I just can’t help thinking that the Cardigans tune might cause a world-annhilating explosion if brought into contact with a sufficient number of members.

Thanks for shopping at BTC News.

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Breaking News! Rosanne Cash’s “Burn Down This Town” has been replaced by The Breeders’ “Cannonball Divine Hammer”. For now.

Plus, edited for style at noon on Saturday. !

Plus, the final version of the Junior League CD as burned, below! We should learn in a few days how well, or not, it was received, and of course will report on that if we feel like it.

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01. “The Kind” - Steve Earle
02. “Da Doo Ron Ron” - Dave Edmunds
03. “Hello My Baby” - Ladysmith Black Mambazo
04. “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s A Doll Revolution)” - The Bangles
05. “Extraordinary Machine” - Fiona Apple
06. “Color Me Impressed” - The Replacements
07. “Divine Hammer” - The Breeders
08. “Yanqui Go Home” - Camper Van Beethoven
09. “Been It” - The Cardigans
10. “Let’s Move to the Country” - (Smog)
11. “Something Familiar” - Curve
12. “Chasing Strange” - Chocolate Genius
13. “Hollywood Bed” - The Blasters
14. “Wolf at the Door” - Patty Larkin
15. “Chuco’s Cumbia” - Los Lobos
16. “Worms” - Beth Orton
17. “Time Running” - Tegan and Sara
18. “That Old Sweet Roll (Hi-De-Ho)” - Dusty Springfield
19. “Happy Trails” - Quicksilver Messenger Service

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I’ve been browsing the somewhat peculiar music collection at the main branch of the Santa Monica public library. I’ve come to trust, more or less, the music buyer’s taste in popular music, but have noted a number of quirks, a la the Girls. There’s a group called the Beta Band which is represented by four titles, all of which have been on the shelf each time I checked; they’re clearly not greatly in demand. Is the buyer’s cousin in the band? What’s the cross-pollination between the Beta Band and the Girls? And while one could make a case that Velvet Underground is overrated, well, not even one title? Not even a best of? Please. And then John Cale, the intermittently unlistenable engine of the group, shows up with two solo titles.

But it’s been a mostly positive experience. I got to hear The Cardigans’ version of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”, which is hard to top on several scales. I introduced myself to a band called Curve; the CD, Come Clean had a bad track on it, but the ones I could hear ranged from satisfying to very good. I met an intriguing girl group called Tegan and Sara. In fact most of the groups I’ve been exploring have female vocalists, at least. The only real disappointment on that score has come in the lethargic form of Vanessa Carter, a chanteuse with a damp fuse.

Mostly what I’m looking for are perfect songs. Probably hundreds of groups have the chops to produce a perfect song. I suppose that includes heavy metal groups, one of which I picked up because of the title (Burn, Piano Island, Burn) without knowing the genre. I think it’s heavy metal, anyway: lots of screaming and guitar overdubs. There may have been a perfect song on the CD, possibly even the one I listened to for 30 seconds or so, but I wouldn’t know how to recognize it.

Some of the groups and individuals I found were ones I knew well, some were ones I’d had limited experience of, some I knew of but hadn’t heard, and others, like Curve and Tegan and Sara, were entirely new to me. Right now I’m listening to a Ladysmith Black Mambazo CD, Long Walk to Freedom, which includes guest appearances from the likes of Belgian Afropop group Zap Mama and Natalie Merchant (on different tunes), with the song on which Zap Mama appears coming near perfection. It’s a CD best listened to in private, by me anyway, because it’s one of those things.

A surprise was the Paul Westerberg CD, Suicaine Gratification. Westerberg was the front man for The Replacements, a hard-rocking bunch of drunks who were one of my favorite bands back in one of the days (early 1980s). While much of the sentiment remains the same, Westerberg’s solo CD is extraordinarily restrained instrumentally. I’ll have to listen to it a few more times to see whether I’m missing a perfect song, but on the whole it’s enjoyable to this point and at least an interesting counterpoint to The Replacements, to whom I’ve also been listening.

Heard of, never paid much attention to, now enjoying to greater or lesser degrees: The Mekons, The Wallflowers, The Knitters, Patty Larkin. Never even heard of and now enjoying to greater or lesser degrees: Smog, Curve, Tegan and Sara, The Charlatans UK, The Blue Nile. Definitely some perfect songs in that collection of sometimes astonishing artists.

Previous favorites, new (to me) work: Richard Thompson, Billy Bragg, Beth Orton, Rickie Lee Jones, Roseanne Cash, John Hiatt, Dusty Springfield, Steve Earle and others, plus a bunch of music with which I’m intimately familiar but hadn’t heard in a while. More on this later. And yes, I know it’s unbelievable that I don’t know anything about your favorite group or solo artist. What, have I been living in a cave? Sheesh.

In other news, Jonathon Raban has a story on Sarah Palin in the current London Review of Books. Raban manages to combine solid research and writing with a near-hysterical tone. It’s pretty strange. Not that I have anything nice to say about Palin, very far from it, but it’s distracting when people wander off into ad hominem when there’s so much substance to assault.

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