Books

penny-pinching beasts

Sunrise somewhere over Seattle

Biden’s infrastructure bill, the American Jobs Bill has $16 billion designated for capping unproductive oil wells and for cleaning up abandoned mines, most of the money would end up being spent in rural America because that’s where most of the hole punching and mine digging occurred.

That’s fine and dandy but I’d go a mile or two further on this project. Since we’re already out here maybe this program could be designed to help stabilize the economies of so many of the rural communities that have for too long been ignored, neglected and are lurching from one crisis to the next.

Here’s what we do…

First if you are now or ever have been a communist sympathizer, you might want to reconsider. Are you an advocate for a leaner, meaner government? All this passion for penny pinching, beast starving bathtub drowning obsessions of the past four decades have left our government too small and the fossil fuel industry too damn big. This goes by another word, it’s called inequality.

Fair minded citizens trying to keep up with all the bankrupting wildcatting oil well abandoning shenanigans know the industry has painted our country into a tight spot. We’ve been left with a big mess with untold climate emergency consequences. In other words, central planning has screwed the pooch and the consequences are that the taxpayers got some land to restore and oil well capping to do.

If you haven’t noticed or maybe you have and just don’t give a flying sexual intercourse of two or three our nation has been growing. You can tell by sprawl, gridlock and the number of cranes hovering over our urban landscape. We’ve got a big mess that is even bigger than the previous mess, which happens to be the stinking mess I am talking about, and like it or not we are going to have to pick up the tab. Bellyachers can put a sock in it starting now.

Inequality is a Scourge on our democracy

I’d like to digress just for one moment. Senator Rand Paul opposes fixing our country’s infrastructure unless it is to do with a fence Mexico is never going to pay for. Doing nothing to fix our rotting infrastructure is notably deficient of sentience, or as the colloquial saying goes, doing nothing is just plain dumb. Thank you kindly.

Let’s continue…

So here is what I think might be useful to maintaining the peace and quiet in this trigger happy hopped up on Fox News Television nation. I propose we hire good men and women who want and can hold a job, bring people in that live nearest to these abandoned oil wells, pay them plenty good, the less education in their resume the more likely they are to be hired, hire more of them and one hell of a lot less of those with higher educations. If you have an advanced degree you are not qualified.

Now I don’t want them to eat crow or humble pie, but I do want every single solitary one of these employees to understand that this is good work, important work, and their generous salary will help hold the union of our nation together. Spending the $16 billion dollars will put hundreds of thousands of our finest on the front lines of the fight against the creeping climate change emergency we are facing. And remember this is just one small piece of a much bigger plan to build our country back better. You got a problem with that then you likely live in a gated community and are stinking mad about everything. Get over yourself.

I’ll want the employees to understand our tax dollars are replacing the oil companies’ royalty payments, lawyers’ fees, and insufficiently funded Bonds that were not up to the task of fixing the predictable mess this industry has made of our landscape.

I’d argue any worker that hates on our country while pocketing wages while employed in this program be confronted by their choice of television viewing habits. We should dream up some kind of oath of employment, you know something simple like: I promise to fix what the oil and gas industry has left broken and to the best of my ability appreciate the wages I am earning and the wisdom of the taxpayers of our great nation for having the integrity to step up and give me a job, help put a roof over my head and food on my table. I promise I will work on holding the private sector accountable in the future, and as we do hold these big fat liars to account, and when all our work is finished and built back better, we may resume seeking a more perfect smaller sized government and union.

I’m all too sure most of what I’m proposing makes plain old horse sense but likely wouldn’t pass muster with the local, regional, state, private or public entities that are hellbent on preserving a citizen’s right to gripe and grumble about near darn every damn thing under the sun.

Let me just take a moment to say that Senator Rick Scott is miserable at his job and before all that misery this rascal sucked $300 million taxpayers’ dollars out of Medicare and put what was fraudulently skimmed from the federal government into his own greedy pocket. Florida’s phosphate pond problems were on his watch too. Enough said.

Bridges are Infrastructure

This next issue is a serious as a heart attack. There are some dangerous unhappy unhinged young single men in the United States that need opportunity. Many are located near all these holes that need capping. Getting a bored unproductive young man stood up and doing something productive might help with all those other problems we all would prefer not to think about. We might try to get this buckaroo off fentanyl, might get him to dial back on his porno watching, videogame addiction and maybe take that big fat wallet he’s got full of fresh earned honest wages and ask some philly out for a romp around town seated next to him in that new electric powered Hummer he’s just purchased for cash. Forming relationships is healthy, walking through the world alone is harmful to a persons mental health.

Almost every single solitary plug nickel, dime and quarter has ended up going to the Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Billy Gates, and Elon Musk. Time we shower the workers with half a chance to make a little something for themselves. I want more daycare and I want as many women hired in the oil field operation as is humanly possible. As a kid I hated going to an all-boys school and darn if working with a lot of different kinds of people isn’t just healthier for everyone concerned.

Saturday morning, I woke up in Seattle where I had been for a week visiting my daughter for the first time since February of 2020. I’m all over the American West these days. If you didn’t know the stinking gridlock you experience where you live is just as awful everywhere else. In Seattle I tried driving across Ballard back to Capitol Hill and it was no less a grind than trying to go east on Melrose when you are trying to get your sorry butt out of West Hollywood.

Let’s get a wiggle on we’ve a whole wide wonderful world to enjoy if we could just stop with all this nonsense about not ever fixing the stuff that needs fixing. Roads, bridges, water pipes, sewer lines, and could we get serious about upgrading our dilapidated airports. Passing through New York’s JFK shouldn’t be a virtual terrorizing Grand Theft Auto looking dystopian close encounter with a post-apocalyptic reality. We are so much better than all of this.

Meet you and yours at the water cooler and would you all talk about these urgent matters. We have a nation to rebuild.

Books

Singing Telegram Gigging

Living in an Unpredictable World

Psychological resilience in this after-times is demanded of civilizations players. To survive this rollicking adventure we must adapt to fast moving viruses, wildfires, and weaponized inequality.

Mask wearing, I don’t mind. Socially distancing, I’m hermetic by nature. Vaccinations, I’m ready when they’ve got one that works.

Yesterday I could see and smell smoke here in Northern California where wildfire erupted in Napa County. Evacuations were ordered. Being forced out of your home is disorienting, especially while fleeing and having forgotten your mask.

Into the Wildest Places

Perhaps yours is not but my economy is shattered. For the moment if you are landing on your East Hampton’s helipad things might be just dandy. The peasants in pitchforks are plenty stirred up by the madness that passes for a Republican President and Congress but whether they are going to slow roast their hard-hearts remains a longshot. As we say in the trade, “I like oligarch I’ve just never been able to finish a whole one.”

Swift moving flames of wildfire burn one thing down and odd as it seems another thing isn’t touched. Entertainment industry is shuttered the lives of tens of thousands of ballet dancers, actors, singers, musicians, choreographers, conductors, orchestras, theme parks, circus shows, street performers are all out of work. Movie theaters, Las Vegas, nightclubs, comedy joints, strip clubs, and singing telegram gigs are all kaput.

Better Living Through Virus Dodging

All of what had been reliable and true is no longer the case. We may not wander about the world with our passports, enter and exit most of the world as we once did. We may have thought living on some leafy lane a terrific bit of pastoral splendor at one time and of course now you’ll have to have your head examined before occupying such a residence.

We continue to struggle about whether citizens are going to have access to health-care. Two months from now our Supreme Court may toss out the Affordable Care Act and with it will go coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Depending upon how you count that group of unfortunates, to give you a ballpark figure, approximately all of us will be affected by this change.

Starter Home

As we all dash about dodging the plague and wildfires while searching for new jobs, because we can’t perform the work we’ve spent our life training for, our titans of finance are doing their damned best to get their morally bankrupt huckster back in the Oval Office.

History’s warning chastens our self-conceit. Turning the page on the industrial revolution and building a brighter more survivable renewable energy economy is like you know going to take a moonshot. The technology has all been invented, we have the tools, what is lacking is a means of organizing the human spirit into a coherent civilization saving act.

We’ll need leaders at the top. We’ll need an activist citizenship. Mobilizing will require a colossal deployment of people and technologies. Jobs will be plentiful. The economy will thrive, but yeah there are going to be winners and losers. To that end we’ll show those sectors of the economy that need a hand up how a more compassionate capitalism can work.

None of what I’ve outlined is remotely original. This plan waits. November’s election is crucial. Democracy, civilization and the football season are all on the line. Vote like your season tickets depend upon it.

Books

Making it Real

Laura is a Category 4 hurricane barreling through the Gulf of Mexico’s overheated waters taking aim at East Texas-West Louisiana. The timing of Laura’s arrival is a national nightmare. Predictions are for tidal surges to reach up to 30 miles inland.

Driving through Oregon and Idaho Sunday and Monday I was in thick smoke from wildfires. The haze stretched 400 miles. The scale of our disasters, both political and environmental are unbound.

Patriots that gave their lives for our freedom

Fight like your life depends on it. Don’t think for one second if the current executive office holder can cage those children that he won’t eventually get around to caging your children. Authoritarians don’t play nice. You get on the wrong list and your share of nice is coming to a startling end. Guaranteed by 180k souls that have already found out.

Wildfires are bigger, hurricanes more powerful, our newest pathogen is easily spread, it kills, hospitalizes victims, wreaks havoc on internal organs. Somehow we have gone merrily along the road of denial as our world becomes ever more unmanageable.

Our most populous state, California has in the last five years been terrorized by the largest fires in its history. In 70 years California’s population has gone from twelve million to forty million. Arriving with this rising tide of authoritarian sympathizers and left coast liberals is a mentally deluded leader with no talent for confronting reality.

Look it is now only a matter of time before one of California’s wildfires comes racing down the hillsides toward one of our treasured places. Berkeley, Palo Alto, Mill Valley are all in harms way. What does the day after we lose the fight to save one our city’s look like?

We must not surrender what so many sacrificed to preserve

Like pretending that a highly contagious pathogen wouldn’t emerge crossover from wild animals to infect mankind was to put it succinctly just dumb. And then there is the matter of how deadly a new pathogen might be.

So as we try to scale our troubles we might well consider the corner we are in and how best to extract humanity from this tight spot. First we’re going to have to fight this virus. Getting this bug under control will be no small or easy task but we can’t do much else until we do. Second, we’ll be digging out of a horrible economic collapse and like FDR we’ll need to put millions back to work building an energy system for the 21st Century. Third, we’ll be busy prosecuting the cult that erupted in our midst and followed their dear leader over the cliff. In the midst of all of this we’ll be fighting wildfires and seeking emergency shelter from gargantuan climate emergency fueled hurricanes.

We start by voting. Don’t vote for people that like caging children, want to take health care away from citizens, like to cut taxes on billionaires and send the working stiffs off to foreign wars. Use your head and get a grip about the superficial color of another human beings skin. We are out of options and fascistic alternatives make matters that much worse.

Time to not just be safe but to get real.

Books · Performances

Skyline at Twilight

Women’s March Phoenix, Arizona 2019

Nashville’s famed music district is being dismantled. Nobody can blame anybody. Times haven’t changed but the price of real estate has. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Jazz a favorite idiom frequented by this street act no longer sells. America’s great gift to music exists in the hearts and minds of the musicians. The marketplace not so much.

I am ramping up for shows. If I did not exist the world would have to invent me. I’ve played the parkways and boulevards of America’s greatest cities since 1974.

The gods have tossed sky high real estate, fierce solar radiation, and an ever decreasing value of that famous buck that is supposed to stop here. Dollars do stop but in what quantity and to what useful purpose?

I got my heart set on playing Fort Collins, Colorado. Not now! I’ll arrive and set up shop uninvited. I’ll play as I can as much as I can for a few weeks in June. After I’ll run north with the arrival of summer crossing the border into Canada.

The whole street performing enterprise is scaled to the grass roots. If I can draw a crowd is one thing. If I can keep them until the end is another. Between I play my song, sing my lyric, tickle a few unsuspecting minds with my version of vagabond dreams.

Honesty is our Ultimate Elixir

Andrew Elliott a fine Australian entertainer friend employs the same tactics as I use. We move from place to place landing in the least likely public thoroughfares. Catching a crowd off guard, unprepared…think cultural shock therapy of a kind.

Hit people in the heart. Give a citizen a living example of betting everything. Funny is useful but earnest charm, authenticity and soulful purpose transcends and takes an audience further.

Death in Venice was a movie, hard times falling on Nashville’s music scene is a reality. Street theater, street performing, busking, call it what you will is the ultimate fungible form. I’ll fudge my way into the hearts and minds of the least suspecting.

I’m coming for a thousand clowns and a few thousand altered softened hearts. I’m coming for the better angels and freedom seeking immigrant Russians. I’m coming to alter the fabric of the commons. To bless the youthful dreamers looking for their true path.

As I said if I did not exist they’d have to invent me. I am like Nashville, jazz and the American Musical an indispensable historical artifact of our cultural life.

See you out there.

Books

Robber Barons Revenge

LA Market

A Little Fixer Upper for the Newly Minted Upper Lowers

Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century published down the rabbit hole of 2013 quantified capital’s relentless advantage over labor. The book researched and factually illustrated that the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of return on output. In other words the rich always get richer.

And down another rabbit hole was instantly vanished vast sums due to 2008’s global financial crisis. In one day Congress gave our banks more money than had ever been given over the span of a hundred years to poverty programs. God and Congress saved the Hampton’s, helicopters and whore houses. One out of three ain’t bad.

The whole Brexit thing was related to ordinary citizens living outside London having had their fill of the consortium of international bankers holed up in the City of London from relentlessly plucking their pocketbooks with the cooperation of a bought and paid for just down the River Thames Parliament. The populist’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were both dead and never were as charming as Paul Newman or Robert Redford. The ever charming actor Ronald Reagan and Britain’s Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher are Sun City’s poster children for the Gilded Age’s resuscitation.

Camera 360

Betting the House…

Unemployment was epidemic, millions of homes foreclosed, bankruptcies skyrocketed and drug abuse, suicide and shiftlessness were synonymous with the new millennium’s urban chic. As implosions go this was a doozy, as in Neo-Duesenbergian excess.

Our French scholar dude- Picketty- had the temerity to suggest that since capital was so muscularly advantaged in the acquisition of wealth over labor that the best way to address this bully’s advantage was through the progressive taxation system that had served the free world so well since last we visited capitalism’s long lost Uncle Dave Depression of misery in the 1930’s.

To extinguish the fires of civil discord from our previous Gilded Age Teddy Roosevelt gathered the robber barons— banging their heads together until sense was made and a solution was agreed upon— that a redistributive progressive taxation system would be created to fund a social safety net so that when capitalism developed the inevitable wobbles there would be some modest stabilizers there to help and support the citizens of a country from certain misery and deprivation. If the robber barons would not block the creation of the social welfare programs our leaders would not block capitalism to run ahead at a good pace, not too fast so as to cause speculative bubbles and depressions, but fast enough to create growth while tolerating the inevitable recessionary downturns, more akin to an accident than a full catastrophe. Hence, in 1914 the creation of our Federal Reserve Bank System.

So here we are. Progressive taxation is threadbare, the social safety net is in tatters, and our latest crop of robber barons emboldened as ever desperate to horde every newly minted dime claiming the lion share of profit as their destiny and the resulting poverty their greed causes as the fault of the shiftless ungrateful rabble living just beyond their security gates.

Our politics and peace is at risk for the odd stalemated and captured bifurcated duopoly called the two party system. We have somewhere in our history chosen to layer democracy atop capitalism and ever since the two systems coexist in skirmish and dis-ease. The latest win in Congress for our oligarchs is a loss for the vast majority. The resulting size and scale of the inevitable wave heading toward the election in November 2018 remains for history to tell. This isn’t money as speech, this is overreach as blowback. I can hear the bugles, see the pitchforks- I can  imagine a progressive tax system being reinstated. The challenge to the working class has been joined.

working class heros

Enjoying the Spoils of Roosevelt’s Victory

Books · Uncategorized

Against the Grain

barn

The Next Steps

The current novel I am drafting is set in Napa County. Climate change, inequality and the health of of both the people and environment is under stress. Studying groundwater levels, fish extinction events, the alarming increase of childhood cancer rates (the highest in any county in California) has been painful to acknowledge. There has been a loss of innocence in my life. County officials in lockstep with the biggest agricultural corporations in the valley dictate what does and doesn’t happen here. The climate is changing, the available water has all been claimed. It is a jewel of a county and California’s smallest. It has grown into a world class international tourist destination. Both businesses and visitors clamor to come here and get a piece of the action. A wide array of community organizations are struggling to slow the rapid rate of growth. We’ll need more soul searching to bridle the billion dollar corporations that find sustainability issues irrelevant to their business plans. The struggle to thwart the rich and powerful from reining down ruin upon this world class destination falls upon the ordinary citizens who live here. Tough stuff… now with the changes in Washington DC the mood of the country seems to have turned against any further supervision or regulation of this great treasure the gods have handed to us. So, yes, I am the loyal opposition. Good ideas I’ll cooperate with and bad ideas I’ll resist. This is where we find out if we can save the world…