Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 146

The Fight Was Fixed

Maybe years from now we'll all remember where we were when we first heard of the trickle-down theory of economics. Or not. But it's had such an effect on our financial lives that we should pay attention to just how little, for how long, has been trickling down since the Reagan years brought major tax cuts for the wealthy and other goodies, a policy that went viral, as it were. Oxfam's devastating report Working for the Few gets your attention with this stat: the richest 85 people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. Released just ahead of tomorrow's World Economic Forum in Davos, the report details just what such massive worldwide income inequality means:  “Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations. We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest.”
Too bad my favorite economist, Leonard Cohen, is not performing his "Everybody Knows" at Davos.
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows --B.B.

The Making of a Good "Dr."

Continuing my 50th anniversary tribute to my favorite film (it was unleashed at the end of this month in 1964 after a slight delay caused by the JFK assassination), here's a 45-minute doc on the making of Dr. Strangelove.   Here's my earlier posts: the trailer that was killed for decades and an amazing LEGO version. -- G.M.

Texas Songwriter Dies in Rifle Accident

Under the recurring title "Today in Gun Nutty USA" I'm accustomed to posting horrid accidents that take the lives of Americans, often quite young.  I could do it every day, maybe every hour.  But today's is especially tragic because the victim is a well-known Texas songwriter, Steven Fromholz, age 68.   A hunting rifle in a case accidentally discharged when he dropped it  at a ranch in badly-named Eldorado.

Fromholz was far from a household word but revered by songwriters and performers in the state, and recorded the album, more than 40 years that many consider the birth of the Texas "outlaw" music movement, later to star Willie and Waylon.  He was named poet laureate for the state in 2007.   When Lyle Lovett recorded his acclaimed double-CD tribute to Texas songwriters, Step Into This House, he featured great tunes by Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark but one of the best was Fromholz's ten-minute "Texas Trilogy."  Lyle also recorded his "Bears."  Here's the original "Texas Trilogy" but Lyle's version tops it.  -- G.M. 

Catapulting Into the News

Video of the day, from the wild and now increasingly violent street protests in Kiev:  See folks wheeling out a homemade, Middle Ages-style catapult, and then sending some sort of projectiles in direction of police (amid chants of "load it").  Stun grenades fired in response.  I'll recall that this all started two months ago with thousands singing the "Ode to Joy."   UPDATE:  Here's live ustream of scary showdown tonight. -- G.M.

A Handsome Production

If you're getting addicted to the new limited-run HBO series "True Detective" you may be wondering what-the-hell-is-that when listening to fantastic and odd opening credits tune, one of best ever for a series.  I first thought it might be an old, obscure Nancy Sinatra-Lee Hazlewood ditty.  Turns out it's by the Canada/Albuquerque duo The Handsome Family, who I first caught doing "A Thousand Kisses" deep in that cool Leonard Cohen doc a few years back.  Here's both. --G.M.

Tangled Up in Bob

One of the great albums of our era, Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, released on this day in 1975.  I'd heard a different version a few days earlier, with different color and liner notes, at Crawdaddy (indeed the whole album had been re-recorded).  It would make most of the #1 Best Album polls at the end of year.   It's impact was so profound because many had given up hope that he'd ever make another great album.  Here's clip from Renaldo and Clara, the infamous doc on his subsequent Rolling Thunder tour (I was at the kickoff, in Plymouth).  He was already changing the lyrics, changing pronouns at will.   Below that, for fun, Miley Cyrus covers "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." -- G.M.

Bigfoot, Bill Clinton and Pancake Condiment Theft

You will not want to miss Lucas Adams' (literally) graphic account in Modern Farmer of the "biggest theft of a pancake condiment in history," a syrup heist in Saint-Loius-de-Blanford. (The Quebec incident is being made into a feature by Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon, with Jason Segal).  And you will want to check out other tasty articles at Modern Farmer, where even Bill Clinton appears (a Q& A on global agriculture). But he really can't compete with the 24/7 lamb cam, or articles like "Move Over Bigfoot, Here Comes Sheepsquatch."  -- B.B.

A Bridge Too Far?

NYT with a major piece and online visuals (the first in a series) on one of America's biggest construction projects--and I can watch it, right from my front yard at the top of the hill overlooking the Hudson River.

It's the $4 billion replacement for one of longest bridges anywhere, at over three miles, the Tappan Zee, which joins Rockland to Westchester counties just north of New York City (my photo at left).  It's at virtually the widest part of the Hudson and why it was built in the mid-1950s here--well, it's a long, sordid story but we'll leave that for now.

What's not in the rah-rah Times story are several key points, including a promised massive toll hike (doubling the current rate) to pay for the bridge, which was minimized in the steamrolling for the new structure.  Plus: While the bridge aims to sharply reduce traffic congestion it actually will offer not a single new lane of rush-hour access for cars.  Right now the seven lanes on the bridge are adjusted so you get four lanes at rush-hour in either direction.  The new bridge will provide eight lanes--always divided in half.

And most of the traffic congestion is caused not by ultra-bridge traffic but the tightening of Thruway lanes on both sides.  And the congestion, even so, had already been eased over the past decade by several measures, including EZ-Pass.  Take my word for it--I commuted nearly every day from 2000-2009.

There are a few benefits (including a bike/walking "lane" and a lane for the relatively few buses that use the span) but commuters will likely be bitching about continued tie-ups--at twice the toll.  Love this from the Times' story:  "Bottlenecks may not end entirely."  Ya think? 

Early on, when residents questioned why, after all these years, a new bridge would not include rail service from train-poor Rockland to train-rich Westchester, the state dangled the possibility of future tracks attached to the bridge but that's nearly a pipedream at this point--with staggering costs if ever attempted.

The Times also repeats the (likely) urban legend that when the bridge was built it was expected to last only 50 years.  We heard that up here from the press and bridge advocates for years but when critics pressed for an actual source none could be found.  Perhaps they've found it since but I'd like to see it.

Also minimized by officials, and the Times,  were the certain disruptions in existing traffic from the many years of construction to come (by the way, they also have to tear down the current bridge).   Already commuters are fuming about the closing--for the duration--of the key access lane to the bridge on the Tarrytown side, which has caused delays of up to half an hour or more for the daily evening commute.  And work has barely begun.  State officials had pooh-poohed that first major disruption. Our local paper, the Journal News, observed: "Like so many other aspects of the project, the planned impacts didn’t match the reality."

Well, at least the Times corrected a rather major error in an earlier version of the story--getting the name of where the bridge starts/ends in Rockland.   -- G.M.

Plan Bee

This week in London a national conference on bee health is taking place, and new research shows it's not just nasty pesticides like neocontinoids (banned in the EU but not in US) that affect bee health, but also the pyrethroid pesticides.  Why does this matter? Because of the EU moratorium on the use of neonicotinoids, the use of others such as pyreththroids are likely to increase.
We’ll pause here to point out the scientists tracked how the bee colonies in the study exposed to the pesticide grew over a four- month period, weighing bees on appropriately tiny and no doubt adorable bee-scales.
Anyone who eats food should care about downsized bees. Scientists fear smaller bees will be less effective at foraging for nectar and carrying out their essential-to-the-food-chain task of distributing pollen.  Read more.  -- B.B.

More Weak Ends For Bernies

Just as the woefully under-funded and understaffed SEC is trying to get its arms around high-speed trading and its effects on markets, Congress votes to fund it, and The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, at a level guaranteed to keep them in the Stone Age.  So we're back to heavy reliance on the industry's self-regulatory organizations to provide oversight; what could possibly go wrong? Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, tells the Financial Times:  “The SEC situation is bad, but the CFTC situation is criminal.”
Future Bernie Madoffs must be feeling smug. As Dennis Kelleher,  president of Better Markets, a Washington, D.C.,-based investor advocacy group, told Fox Business News:  "Slashing that fund is not only wrong, it’s stupid. Only Wall Street benefits from not properly funding the SEC. Any other claim or excuse is phony.” -- B.B.