Late Night: Woody Guthrie Centennial

Posted: July 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , | 12 Comments

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger at one of his last concerts, Lennox, MA, July 1950

Above is one of a group of photos featured by NPR yesterday on what would have been Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday, had he lived.

After the dust of the Dust Bowl settled down, American folksinger Woody Guthrie moved to New York City and played more for the leftist East Coast intelligentsia than for migrant workers. Among these performances, one of the better documented was an informal concert in a remarkable carriage house in Lenox, Mass.

Neighbors to Tanglewood and the other arts institutions in the Berkshires, Philip and Stephanie Barber ran the Music Inn as a retreat for New York City intellectuals. Over the course of 30 years, they would hold informal folk and jazz concerts, roundtable discussions and other salon-style cultural events in the carriage house of the former summer estate of the Countess de Heredia.

The first concert was in July 1950. Alan Lomax, a friend of the Barbers, hosted a concert featuring Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Rev. Gary Davis. Among those in attendance was Dan Burley, a piano player and journalist for the Amsterdam News and other African-American newspapers.

CNN posted more gorgeous photos of Woody Guthrie in New York in 1943.

Guthrie’s mother had Huntington’s Disease, which is transmitted through a dominant gene. Woody was diagnosed with the disease in 1952, but had probably shown symptoms earlier than that. Huntington’s usually strikes in middle age, when it may have already been passed on to the next generation. I found this site, which tracks Woody’s knowledge of his family history of the disease and his gradual development of symptoms. Woody died on October 3, 1967.

NPR ran a couple of good programs about Woody Guthrie last week–a lengthy one on Fresh Air and a shorter report that highlights the Woody Guthrie archive on All Things Considered.

Woody’s father Charles Guthrie was a businessman and politician and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He apparently participated in the lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson in 1911. On Friday the LA Weekly published a article by Jonny Whiteside that calls Woody Guthrie “a big ol’ racist.” Whiteside also suggests that Guthrie was a fraud in that he lied about the source of his music.

You can read the article to assess these claims. I found the story interesting. I think that every great artist has negative aspects to his or her character, and that can be added to the overall picture. But I think it’s possible to evaluate the work itself separate from the character of the artist. Every human being is a complex mixture of light and shadow, as Jung would say.

I never fail to get chills when I hear “This Land is Your Land,” the radical anthem that Guthrie wrote in response to the song “God Bless America.”

This Land Is Your Land
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

© Copyright 1956 (renewed), 1958 (renewed), 1970 and 1972 by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)


Here are a few more Woody Guthrie songs:

All You Fascists Bound to Lose

Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad

So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You

This one was performed by a number of artists at the Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration: This Train is Bound for Glory.

What’s your favorite Woody Guthrie tune?

Karl Rove and a Moment of Zen

Posted: July 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign | Tags: , , | 33 Comments

“Rove accuses Obama of using ‘gutter politics’ against Romney”

I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you! How could St Karl even know of such things!

During then-Gov. George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign for president, Rove was accused of orchestrating a whisper campaign to suggest that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) “had fathered an illegitimate black child.” In 2003, conservative columnist Robert Novak told federal prosecutors that Rove had also participated in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame in an effort to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, after he accused the Bush administration of invading Iraq under false pretenses.

Romney gives the impression he has something to hide by not releasing his taxes and not explaining the contradictions between the SEC filings, the FEC filings, and interviews he gave back when he was trying to prove he had the legal right to run for Massachusetts governor.

Romney can clean this entire thing up by actually answering questions about his Bain tenure and showing his tax returns like every one else–including his father–has done when running for president.  I’m tried of pearl clutching wingers who are trying to pretend his lack of honesty and openness isn’t shady as hell and that any of us that want real explanations are playing dirty politics.  Who believes this other than their idiot base who buy one lie after another anyway and ascribe to magical thinking?

Show us your taxes Mitt Shady!!!

I’m just a Whinin’ Boy (Pick on Mitt Shady Open Thread)

Posted: July 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Mitt Romney, open thread | Tags: , | 1 Comment

“There is no whining in politics. Stop demanding an apology, release your tax returns.”

– GOP strategist John Weaver, quoted by the AP, calling on Mitt Romney to disclose his tax returns.

OPEN THREAD

(h/t to Ralph for the inspiration)

The LIBOR Scandal: It’s not just for the Brits any more

Posted: July 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis | Tags: , , | 28 Comments

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to describe how serious the LIBOR scandal is without resorting to esoteric finance and economics models.  LIBOR–the London Interbank Offered Rate–is the rate at which many international banks lend money to other banks.  As such, it’s the underlying rate for prime rates around the globe.  It is akin to our Fed Funds rate.  It’s a rate watched by central banks closely and can be targeted by them.  It is not directly under their control but monetary policy can influence it.  Many, many loans are attached to the LIBOR rate and changes in the LIBOR rate.  As such, it allocates loanable funds to many many projects around the world.  It directly allocates funds to projects which–when missed–can lower the economic welfare of many countries.  Here’s just  a small bit that will give you an idea of how important the rate is from footnoted entries at Wiki.

Libor rates are calculated for ten different currencies and 15 borrowing periods ranging from overnight to one year and are published daily after 11 am (London time) by Thomson Reuters.[4] Many financial institutions, mortgage lenders and credit card agencies set their own rates relative to it. At least $350 trillion in derivatives and other financial products are tied to the Libor.[5]

Companies will use LIBOR as a base rate for discounting when evaluating capital projects. This means if the rate is too high or too low, it can impact the decision to build a factory, buy a machine, or expand a project. Let’s just say that nearly every financial and economic decision that’s evaluated based on opportunity costs or discounting uses a rate that’s base on the FED funds rate or LIBOR. It’s probably the most important interest rate in the world.

I’ve promised to write on this before.  I usually have some time on Saturdays for this kind of analysis and that usually means that it may get passed over too.  Last week, there were many discussions on this and most of them had some good explanations of LIBOR basics.  Still, you have to really understand financial and economic decision making to really grok how big of a deal the LIBOR rigging scandal is and will be for some time.  You also have to understand how much our sophisticated markets depend on trust and effective regulation.  Financial markets can be opaque.  They are subject to adverse selection, principal-agent issues, information asymmetry and moral hazard.  They are also the electricity that runs the real sector.  You don’t build a car factory or a levee with out funding from some source sold in a financial market. That’s why you evaluate that decision using cash flow discounting.  For every speculator that won the bet on which way the rate would move, there was one that lost that bet too.  So, gaming the rate is like fixing the spread on every MLB game including the World Series games.

Over and over, we’ve seen that the financial markets–and the folks that participate in them–are not worthy of trust.  We’ve also had some indication that our regulation over them has not been effective.  There are many reasons for that.  Purposeful deregulation, underfunding, and ideological appointments as well as regulator capture have all played a role.

Now, we now that we have trust issues with our regulators in larger ways than we thought possible.  Once again, Timothy Geithner is playing a central role in the questions of what did the NY FED know about the LIBOR gaming and when did they know it? Major newspapers are reporting that the NY Fed was aware of this as early as 2007.  This is as scandalous as the rate gaming itself.

Federal regulators had evidence that major banks could be manipulating one of the world’s most important interest rates a year before the practice came to an end, according to documents released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Friday.

As early as 2007, the officials at the New York Fed suspected that this key rate, which serves as the basis for the interest rates that consumers pay on many loans, did not accurately reflect market forces, the documents show. Then, in April 2008, the New York Fed was explicitly warned by an employee of the British bank Barclays that it was participating in a ruse to “fit in with the rest of the crowd,” referring to other major banks.

The documents, released in response to congressional inquiries, add to the mounting questions about whether federal regulators were aggressive enough in addressing irregularities at the heart of the global financial system.

The new disclosures show that the New York Fed shared its concerns about the London-based Libor rate with British regulators. But the Fed offered no evidence that it had taken additional steps, including exercising its own authority as the regulator of some of the largest U.S. financial firms, to address the rigging of the rate.

“The New York Fed helped to identify problems related to ­LIBOR and press the relevant authorities in the UK to reform this London-based rate,” the Fed said in a statement. The Fed declined to say what other steps it might have taken and is still exploring whether there are more details it can release.

The ma­nipu­la­tion by Barclays did not end until some point in 2009, offering the freshest evidence of how regulators struggled to oversee the largest banks during the global financial crisis.

Again, this is appalling.  It implies that sitting Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner knew about this.  It appears that Geithner made the BOE aware of the situation by memo.  How much farther the interaction goes is unknown at this point.

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government knew back in 2008 that Barclays was filing false reports about Libor, the interest rate that international banks charge one another for short-term loans, according to documents released Friday. The documents show that a staffer at the U.K.-based bank told the New York Federal Reserve—which was then run by current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—more than four years ago about the false reports before the admission was circulated through the federal government.

Barclays has been fined about $450 million for its role in fixing the rate. The Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) scandal has swept through the banking world, with other institutions, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, all acknowledging that they are being investigated.

Congress is just getting up to speed on this.  Interestingly enough, it appears the driving force is Maxine Waters.

The House Financial Services Committee will get a private tutorial next week on the LIBOR scandal a day before Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is expected to be pressed by lawmakers about the central bank’s role in overseeing Wall Street giants being investigated for possibly manipulating the benchmark interest rate.

Reps. Spencer Bachus and Barney Frank, the committee’s top Republican and Democrat, have set up a July 17 briefing for staff with the Congressional Research Service, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO that was circulated Friday to members of the Financial Services Committee.

Bernanke will testify before the committee on July 18 in a regularly scheduled hearing on monetary policy.

Some liberal lawmakers have privately been agitating for a separate hearing focused solely on the rate setting scandal instead of simply being given an opportunity to quiz officials when they come before the committee for other business.

According to a Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) had started to circulate a letter demanding a hearing on LIBOR but she was encouraged not to send it to Bachus and Frank.

The decision to at least temporarily forego a hearing comes as allegations of international banks manipulating the LIBOR benchmark interest rate hit Washington, D.C., this week. A newly released memo revealed that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had expressed concerns about the problem as far back as 2008 during his tenure as president of the New York Federal Reserve.

The memo, sent to the head of Bank of England, Mervyn King, Geithner had made recommendations on ways to “improve the integrity and transparency of the rate-setting process.”

The big question is did the FED investigate or look into the role of its member banks in the rigging scam?  This scandal hopefully will allow us to look at the huge money center banks again and their monopoly power over so many markets.  I’ll be following this closely.

Saturday Reads, Politics Overload Edition

Posted: July 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, nature | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 41 Comments

Good Morning!!

I’m a little burned out on politics at the moment, so I’m going to focus other kinds of news. I’ve got some nature stories and a few other odds and ends.

The photo above shows a rare baby white bison that was born in Connecticut last month.

[W]hen Bison No. 7 on Peter Fay’s farm gave birth to a white, 30-pound bull calf a month ago, it made the Fay farm below Mohawk Mountain, for the moment at least, the unlikely epicenter of the bison universe.

For Mr. Fay, what happened was an astoundingly unexpected oddity — white bison are so rare that each birth is viewed as akin to a historic event.

For Marian White Mouse of Wanblee, S.D., and other American Indians, it is a supremely auspicious message from the spirits. She will fly with her family to Connecticut for naming ceremonies at the end of the month that are expected to draw large crowds.

….

Mr. Fay said his Indian friends had told him that a white bison was considered the most sacred thing imaginable — its birth viewed as something like the Second Coming….Mrs. White Mouse, a member of the Oglala Lakota people, said a white bison was believed to be a manifestation of the White Buffalo Calf Maiden, or Ptesan Wi. She is revered as a prophet, who in a time of famine taught the Lakotas seven sacred rituals and gave them their most important symbol of worship, the sacred pipe.

“They are very rare, and when a white bison is born there is a reason for each one to be here,” Mrs. White Mouse said.

Only one in ten million bison are albinos. You can watch some videos of the baby bison here.

Two snow leopard moms and their cubs were located recently in Mongolia and were filmed for the first time ever.

Snow leopard dens are difficult to find because of the animals’ secretive, elusive nature and the difficult, mountainous terrain in which they live. Finding the dens is an important step in learning more about the reproductive behavior and the young of this endangered species.

“We have spent years trying to determine when and where snow leopards give birth, the size of their litters, and the chances a cub has of surviving into adulthood,” said Tom McCarthy, executive director of the snow leopard program at Panthera, a wild cat conservation organization….

The dens were discovered in Mongolia’s Tost Mountains, where locals refer to the creatures as “Asia’s Mountain Ghost.”

A team of scientists from Panthera and the Snow Leopard Trust entered the dens when the mothers were away hunting. They found that the first had two cubs and the second, one. All three cubs were weighed, measured and photographed and handled with extreme care, according to a Panthera release. Two were fixed with tiny microchip ID tags (about the size of a grain of rice) that were placed under their skin for future identification.

Here’s the video:

A little three-month-old kitten stowed away in a shipping container and traveled from Shanghai to Los Angeles, somehow surviving the trip without food or water.

The orange-and-white short-haired kitten traveled 6,500 miles before arriving Wednesday.

It was unclear how many days the kitten was in the container. The trip can take as long as 21 days, according to freighter-travel.com.

The stowaway was retrieved from the container at a Compton-area business where it was delivered.

Los Angeles County animal control officers are cautiously watching his health.

Poor little thing. I hope he survives and finds a home.

Next, a silly story involving a tree (including video): Devout see Virgin Mary in N.J. tree trunk, erect shrine around it

Some people walk past the tree in suburban New Jersey and see … well, a tree. Others walk past it and see what they say is a miracle — an image of the Virgin Mary in the trunk, which has become the centerpiece of a shrine rising on the hot pavement.

“It’s amazing,” Dile Marku, part of the throng surrounding the tree, told WABC, the local ABC affiliate, on Friday, after news of the wondrous piece of wood spread through the city of West New York. “I cannot explain because that’s God’s work, but I know how I feel and what I’ve seen people feeling here for three days. It’s amazing. It is amazing.”

The mayor of West New York, a city of about 49,000 people across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan, said he had received calls from around the world from people wanting to come and see the “miracle” for themselves. Mayor Felix Roque said the attention had led to a shrine so large that he wants to make it permanent, in hopes of drawing visitors to an avenue whose fast-food shops, nail salons and cellphone stores don’t scream “vacation spot.” ….

Locals say the image appeared this week after a man was killed in a car crash in the area. Eva Copantitla, who lives in West New York, was the first to notice the image and alerted the mayor, the Jersey Journal reported.

A California photojournalist was surprised when he found there was a hive containing 50,000 bees in his home. Instead of having them exterminated, he decided to find a bee expert to relocate them. There’s video at the link.

Larry Chen, 27, initially didn’t notice the bees. According to the hired beekeeper, the hive was an estimated six to eights months old.

However, one month ago, Chen began noticing bees buzzing in and out of his window, and he decided to investigate. According to Chen, the bees only came out during a 30-minute window in the day.
“I’m not really terrified of the bees… I just remained calm, and I figured they wouldn’t bother me too much… I got stung once, but I was more curious about how big the hive actually was. I figured it was just a small clump of 1,000 or so,” Chen said.

After his initial investigation, he spent a month on the road, traveling for work. When he returned, Chen found time to call a professional to assess the situation. He explained that he recently saw a documentary about the endangerment of bees, so he wanted to save—not exterminate—them.

He found a man on Craigslist, who goes by the name Mike Bee, who would safely remove the bees. He is a member of the rescue organization Backwards Beekeepers, a group that works with HoneyLove.org in order to educate the public about bees.

Read the rest to learn how the bees were relocated.

Attention gun and pop culture collectors: the guns used by Bonnie and Clyde during their infamous 1930s crime spree will be auctioned off in New Hampshire in September.

She kept a Colt .38-caliber revolver close, while he preferred a .45-caliber pistol from the same maker.

But neither weapon was enough to save American outlaws and lovers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow during a 1934 ambush by law enforcement officers.

After the duo was dead, authorities recovered the revolver Bonnie had secured to an inner thigh with white medical tape.

They also seized the handgun Clyde had tucked into his waistband.

Nearly 80 years later, those guns and other items connected to the infamous gangsters will be going up for auction in New Hampshire on Sept. 30. An auction official estimated Thursday that each Bonnie and Clyde weapon could bring between $100,000 and $200,000.

Also to be auctioned off are

a gold pocket watch Clyde was wearing when he died, and a cosmetics case Bonnie was using to carry lipstick, Coty face powder and a powder puff. The brown leatherette box was inside the Ford automobile the gangsters were riding in when a posse of lawmen riddled it with bullets on a Louisiana road.

Also in the auction is a letter that Clyde wrote to his brother L.C. Barrow on the back of a photo showing a house on a platform surrounded by water. He signed it “bud,” his code name when he was on the run.

On Tuesday at Comic-Con, Hyundai introduced the “zombie survival machine.”

Korean automaker Hyundai unveiled its latest model – the unlikely Elantra Coupe Zombie Survival Machine – at an unlikely venue Tuesday night, Comic-Con International 2012 in San Diego.

Built to withstand the rigors of the coming zombie apocalypse, it features such essential undead-eliminating armaments as a front-end spiked zombie plow, armored window coverings, a roof hatch that enables passengers to fend off attacking walkers, a trunk laden with electric and pneumatic weaponry, front and rear-mounted floodlights and spiked all-terrain/rally type tires.

The heavily customized version of the automaker’s new compact coupe was designed by creator/writer of The Walking Dead TV show and graphic novel series Robert Kirkman, and was fabricated by Design Craft Fabrication in Westminster, Calif.

Video at the link.

Finally, don’t forget that Sunday July 15 is National Ice Cream Day. MSNBC offers some suggestions of where to celebrate.

Those are my non-politics news selections. Feel free to discuss politics or anything else in the comments. What are you reading and blogging about today?

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