‘I Wanted To Tell You’

Posted on December 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

From Matthew Sweet’s third and best album, Girlfriend, which appeared 20 years ago this Fall and proved that the age of hard-driving, well-crafted pop songs wasn’t quite over. It’s a catchy batch of rockers and ballads about crazy love and lost faith, brought to life with a killer studio band that included guitarists Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd.

Sweet’s style of disillusionment was in sharp contrast to that of the grunge rockers who were coming into their own at the time Girlfriend was released. He seemed a disappointed idealist, not a hard-boiled cynic. His cover girl was Tuesday Weld, and one of his weepiest ballads is called “Winona.” He loved the idea of finding love that would last. His vocal harmonies soar to the point where it would be fair to call them anti-grunge.

Footnote: One drawback was that there were too many songs, a common flaw of albums in the CD era. If Sweet had included the 10 best of the 15 songs, Girlfriend might have been a great album.

Posted in arts, pop music | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Banksters spooked by ‘Occupy Our Homes’

Posted on December 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

Not surprisingly, the corporate news media hasn’t made much of the human drama taking place as foreclosures and evictions by the big banks continue across the country. As Michael Moore wrote yesterday, “You need a Kardashian in your home as you’re being evicted to qualify for news coverage.”

And yet organized resistance to foreclosures and evictions continues to grow, thanks to the joint efforts of Occupy Our Homes and Take Back the Land to occupy empty houses while calling attention to fraudulent business practices by the big banks. The resistance is having an effect, as a leaked memo from Bank of America indicates:

A national effort to reclaim vacant properties has one of the country’s largest lenders scrambling. The financial website Zero Hedge has… obtained a memo from Bank of America’s field services operation warning, “We need to make sure we are all prepared.”

Vocal New York organizer Sean Barry told Raw Story Tuesday that an action known as “Occupy Our Homes” would place foreclosed and homeless families in otherwise-vacant homes. That effort began Tuesday with over 40 events in more than 20 cities.

“On Tuesday December 6th there is a potential nationwide protest planned that could impact our industry,” BofA employee Leonard Pavlov reportedly wrote to BAC Field Services. “We believe the protests will likely take place tomorrow at auction sites, homes that are being foreclosed, homes in the eviction stage and vacant homes.”

Among other things, the memo claims Pavlov called on field services not to engage with protesters, but to ensure that BofA properties are “secured.”

Here’s Moore paraphrasing Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, who appeared in his movie Capitalism: A Love Story:

Do not leave your homes if the bank forecloses on you! Let them take you to court and then YOU ask the judge to make them produce a copy of your mortgage. They can’t. It was chopped up a hundred different ways, bundled with a hundred other mortgages, and sold off to the Chinese. If they can’t produce the mortgage, they can’t evict you.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Police armed to the teeth to fight — protesters?

Posted on December 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

We all know that police departments across the country are becoming more and more militarized, as if expecting attacks from a domestic version of the Taliban. But the amount of hardware moving from the Pentagon to the police is even greater than you might have thought, according to Business Insider:

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the “1033 Program” that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute’s project on criminal justice told The Daily, “The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it’s the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire.”

Posted in Congress, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A peculiar way to measure jobs growth

Posted on December 5, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robert Reich is a commonsensical guy, and so what if he sometimes injects false optimism into his commentaries? You can tell he’s merely trying not to be a gloom merchant, that the jobs picture looks as bleak to him as to any other realistic person.

Last week, Reich noted a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey showing unemployment had dropped to 8.6 percent. In his second paragraph he wrote, “We’re not out of the woods but we might be seeing some daylight.”

But from that point on in his column, he listed all the reasons why the government statistics are worth less than zero:

First, this rate of job growth is barely enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population… Second, retail jobs constituted a third of new private-sector employment in November. Retail jobs tend to be unstable, temporary, and low-paying… Third, the jobless rate fell partly because around 315,000 people who had been looking for jobs dropped out of the job market in November… Fourth, hourly earnings are down, as are real wages. So to some extent Americans have been substituting lower wages for lost jobs…

… Fifth, another reason for November’s job growth is that American consumers – whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the economy – increased their spending. But this can’t continue because, as noted, wages are dropping. They spent more by cutting into their meager savings. Don’t expect this to last…

There’s more, but the item about increased spending is a killer. It probably means a lot of people are finally replacing those broken appliances, or putting in those new window frames they’ll need to keep their houses warm.

Reich concludes his list of grim counter-statistics by stating “…it’s way too early to break out the champagne.” Right. The BLS reminds me of a lyric in an old Marvin Gaye song: “You tell me lies that should be obvious to me.” Even Reich can’t help wishing the lies were true.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Victoria loved them all, including Iran

Posted on December 4, 2011 by oddmanout215

People who follow the news in a superficial way may have read about the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran and said “There they go again, those wild-eyed Islamic radicals. Something should be done about them.”

So it was a nice surprise to see a smidgeon of actual history in a newspaper — an explanation in the NYT for Iran’s deep hostility toward Britain, providing context for the news story:

Britain first cast its imperial eye on Iran in the 19th century. Its appeal was location; it straddled the land route to India. Once established in Iran, the British quickly began investing — or looting, as some Iranians would say. British companies bought exclusive rights to establish banks, print currency, explore for minerals, run transit lines and even grow tobacco.

In 1913, the British government maneuvered its way to a contract under which all Iranian oil became its property. Six years later it imposed an “agreement” that gave it control of Iran’s army and treasury. These actions set off a wave of anti-British outrage that has barely subsided.

Britain’s occupation of Iran during World War II, when it was a critical source of oil and a transit route for supplies to keep Soviet Russia fighting, was harsh. Famine and disease spread as the British requisitioned food for their troops…

Once the war ended, Iran resumed its efforts to install democracy, under the leadership of Mohammed Mossadegh… After he was elected prime minister in 1951, Mr. Mossadegh asked Parliament to take the unimaginable step of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry. It agreed unanimously. That sparked a historic confrontation…

More here.

Posted in arts, history, mainstream media, Politics, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

U.N. envoy: Do Occupy protesters have rights?

Posted on December 4, 2011 by oddmanout215

If we live in the land of the free and all that twaddle, then why do our cops treat protesters as if they’re terrorists rather than fellow citizens? Inquiring minds, including a prominent United Nations official, want to know:

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

“I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order,” he said Thursday. “But on the other hand I also believe that the state — in this case the federal state — has an obligation to protect and promote human rights…”

… La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it’s clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces “as long as that doesn’t severely affect the rights of others…”

“…One of the principles is proportionality,” La Rue said. “The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order — but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger.”

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don’t work anyway, he said. In Occupy’s case, he said, “disbanding them by force won’t change that attitude of indignation.”

It’s a sad day when a foreign national working in New York City has to state the obvious not only to the U.S. government, which has become more and more repressive since 9/11, but to the majority of U.S. citizens who walk around in a fog, assuming police misconduct toward protesters isn’t the same as misconduct against all of us.

Posted in mainstream media, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’

Posted on December 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

And I don’t want to ball about like everybody else,
And I don’t want to live my life like everybody else,
And I won’t say that I feel fine like everybody else…

Ray Davis was writing anthems about not fitting in long before punk became fashionable. This one appeared in summer 1966 on the flip-side of “Sunny Afternoon,” but didn’t make it to America until years later when The Great Lost Kinks Album was released.

Posted in arts, pop music | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Obama tries, but wing-nuts reject his love

Posted on December 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

No irony about the sick state of American politics is funnier than the fact that wing-nuts, no matter how far to the right Barack Obama tilts, continue to vilify him as the Great Satan of socialism and the bleeding-heart champion of the poor and unarmed.

Think about it. Our president approved the Fed’s transfer of vast sums to Wall Street banksters. He watched with apparent indifference as millions lost their jobs and/or homes because so much so-called stimulus money had gone to the banks and corporations. His record on the environment and human rights is appalling.

But the wing-nuts think Obama is a socialist who is trying to take away their guns, an absurdity that the NYT’s Timothy Egan explored yesterday:

When it became clear in the early fall of 2008 that Barack Obama, son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, would be the 44th President of the United States, many citizens rushed to their gun shops, stocked up on ammo and camo, and tried to fortify their nests with all manner of lethal weapons…

… Into the early months of the Obama presidency gun sales went though the roof. A nation of at least 200 million firearms reached for ever more, in a hurry and a frenzy.

And then, nothing. No legislation. No speeches about the ubiquity of guns in the most violent of Western democracies. Obama actually increased gun rights, signing a bill with a rider that allows people to pack loaded and concealed heat in national parks…

… There’s no serious case that President Obama is trying to take people’s guns. Guess what grade the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence gave Obama after one year in office? He got an “F” for his gun stance, or lack of same. This after the N.R.A. predicted that he would be the most anti-gun president in history..

Obama has betrayed his core supporters. He has bent over backwards to demonstrate how unsympathetic he is on progressive issues and values. He has prostrated himself to Republican uglies such as Mitch McConnell every time he should have taken a principled stand. He has abased himself and made a mockery of the New Deal in hopes of winning the love of “independents” and, yes, wing-nuts.

Obama wants to be the right wing’s new Reagan but, no matter how hard he tries, they still call him Hitler.

Posted in climate change, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, liar, New York Times, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Frank’s Wild Years’

Posted on December 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

Well Frank settled down in the Valley
and hung his wild years
on a nail that he drove through
his wife’s forehead…

… he sold used office furniture
out there on San Fernando Road
and assumed a $30,000 loan
at 15 1/4 % and put down payment
on a little two bedroom place
his wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
made good bloody marys
kept her mouth shut most of the time
had a little Chihuahua named Carlos
that had some kind of skin disease
and was totally blind. They had a
thoroughly modern kitchen
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit)
Frank drove a little sedan
they were so happy

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple Mickey’s Big Mouths
drank ’em in the car on his way
to the Shell station, he got a gallon of
gas in a can, drove home, doused
everything in the house, torched it,
parked across the street, laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red then
Frank put on a top forty station
got on the Hollywood Freeway
headed north
Never could stand that dog

Posted in arts, humor, pop music | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Yo, Dad, I think it’s a hit

Posted on December 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

 

Do you hope to make her see you, fool?
Do you hope to pluck this dusky jewel?

The Doors didn’t even want to bother with “Hello, I Love You,” it was one of their first songs and they thought it was a throwaway. Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra Records, talked everyone involved into recording it after his 10-year-old son heard the band’s original demo and said, “Dad, I think that’s a hit single.”

The book to read is Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture.

Posted in arts, pop music | Tagged , , | 1 Comment