Monthly Archives: January 2019

Everybody Had An Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles by William McKeen

Posted on by

I’ll quote a few blurbs from the back of the dust jacket and then add a few thoughts.

A widescreen, meticulously researched account of how Los Angeles — the seedbed of surf pop and folk rock — became the epicenter of American music in the 1960s. McKeen follows the thread from the Beach Boys’ sunny innocence to Manson’s noir horrors — via Phil Spector, Jim Morrison, and a supporting cast of hundreds — and brings the music of the City of Angeles brilliant to life. (Barney Hoskyns, author of Waiting for the Sun and Hotel California)

Everybody Had an Ocean offers a detailed snapshot of the creative fertility, debauchery and importance of a signal moment in pop music history. Highly recommended. (Charles Granata, author of Wouldn’t It Be Nice)

… a fascinating, hypnotic look at the underside of the California dream. With smooth prose and keen reporting, William McKeen peels back the facade of peace and love and thoroughly examines the dark heart behind a generation of music… (Michael Connelly)

… Once again, the Beach Boys reign supreme. (Douglas Brinkley)

As the title suggests, Everybody Had an Ocean concentrates on the Beach Boys, especially Brian and Dennis Wilson. But all kinds of musicians appear, including Bob Dylan and the Beatles. If you already know a lot about a particular musician or group, you probably won’t find much new here. The main thing I learned about the Beach Boys was that Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson spent even more time together than I realized. On the other hand, I learned quite a bit about Jan and Dean, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds and the Doors (as well as the Manson “family”).

The book’s prose is not “smooth”, however. The author often resorts to distracting clichĂ©s and slang expressions, especially when he’s discussing who was having sex with who. In general, it could have used a better editor. But if you’re interested in the music of that time and place, Everybody Had an Ocean is worth reading.

The White Album by Joan Didion

Posted on by

The White Album is a 1979 book of Joan Didion’s essays. She wrote them between 1968 and 1978. They mostly chronicle her life in Southern California during that weird decade. Among the topics are a Doors recording session, a business that grows orchids, life in Malibu, how movies are made (it’s all about the deals and money), California’s water supply, the Hoover Dam, the women’s movement, Honolulu past and present, Georgia O’Keefe, Doris Lessing and the Manson murders. One of the topics she doesn’t write about is the Beatles’ White Album.

I’ve read quite a few of Didion’s books. She is a great writer. Sometimes I’ve had trouble understanding the point she is making. I didn’t have that problem this time. In the first few pages of the first essay, she explains her point of view:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling…. I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen… I made gingham curtains for spare bedrooms, … put lentils to soak on Saturday night for soup on Sunday, made quarterly F.I.C.A. payments and renewed my driver’s license on time…

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement…

She made it through this especially disordered period, which lasted six years or so, but the fact that she went through it at all made it easier for me to understand her perspective on things. In these essays, she views the world from a distance, remarking on the interesting things she observes, some of which resist understanding. Shares her observations with us. It’s an excellent book.

Putting the Government Shutdown in Context

Posted on by

If you want to understand why our partial government shutdown is now the longest in history, all you have to do is read this one article in The New York Times. Its title is “In Business and Governing, Trump Seeks Victory in Chaos”.

Throughout his career, the supposed master of negotiation has followed the same pattern over and over again. Make demands, ignore advice, refuse to compromise and don’t worry about any damage done. All that matters is being “the winner”:

Quote:

Three decades ago, [Trump] waged a public battle with the talk show host Merv Griffin to take control of what would become [Trump’s] third Atlantic City casino. Executives at [his] company warned that the casino would siphon revenue from the others. Analysts predicted the associated debt would crush him.

The naysayers would be proved right, but throughout the turmoil [Trump] fixated on just one outcome: declaring himself a winner and Mr. Griffin a loser.

As president, [he] has displayed a similar fixation in his standoff with Congress over leveraging a government shutdown to gain funding for a wall on the Mexican border. As he did during decades in business, [he] has insulted adversaries, undermined his aides, repeatedly changed course, extolled his primacy as a negotiator and induced chaos….

“He hasn’t changed at all,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran a casino for [him] in the 1980s …

[The president] briefly seemed to follow a more conventional approach for a president seeking consensus: encouraging his party leaders in Congress to negotiate a deal. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, shepherded a compromise in December that would have kept the government open and put off negotiations over a wall and other border security measures.

[Trump] was expected to sign off on the deal, but then came the suggestion from conservative critics that he had caved in to Democrats — that he was a loser. It was a perception [he] could not bear, and he quickly reversed course.

He also reverted to lifelong patterns in business …

His lack of public empathy for unpaid federal workers echoes his treatment of some construction workers, contractors and lawyers whom he refused to pay for their work on his real estate projects. The plight of the farmers and small-business owners wilting without the financial support pledged by his administration harks back to the multiple lenders and investors who financed [Trump’s] business ventures only to come up shortchanged.

And his ever-changing positions (I’ll own the shutdown; you own the shutdown; the wall could be steel; it must be concrete; then again, it could be steel) have left heads in both parties spinning…

“I think he was always a terrible negotiator,” said Tony Schwartz, co-author … of The Art of the Deal.

That book, published in 1987, was intended to be [Trump’s autobiography]. Mr. Schwartz said that he created the idea of [Trump] as a great deal maker as a literary device to give the book a unifying theme. He said he came to regret the contribution as he watched [Trump] seize on the label to sell himself as something he was not — a solver of complicated problems.

Rather, Mr. Schwartz said, [Trump’s] “virtue” in negotiating was his relentlessness and lack of concern for anything but claiming victory.

“If you don’t care what the collateral damage you create is, then you have a potential advantage,” he said. “He used a hammer, deceit, relentlessness and an absence of conscience as a formula for getting what he wanted”…

In recent weeks, … his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney … pursued a rather standard tactic in ending the impasse over border security and a wall: He tried to find middle ground between the $1.3 billion to which Democrats had once agreed, and the president’s demand for $5.7 billion. But upon learning of Mr. Mulvaney’s efforts, [Trump] snarled in front of a crowded room that Mr. Mulvaney had [“fucked it all up”] …

During his years in business, [Trump] earned a reputation as someone whose word meant very little. When a commitment he made no longer made sense, he walked away, often blaming the other party with a fantastical line of reasoning.

To win financing from Deutsche Bank to build a Trump Hotel in Chicago, for example, [he] personally guaranteed $40 million of the debt. When he could not make his payments during the 2008 financial crisis, Deutsche Bank executives were open to granting him more time to repay the loan, a person briefed on negotiations later recalled.

But before a compromise could be reached, [Trump] flipped the script. He filed a lawsuit and argued that the bank had helped cause the worldwide financial meltdown that essentially rendered [him] unable to make his debt payments. At the time, Deutsche Bank called the lawsuit “classic Trump.”

The bank eventually settled…. [Trump] expressed his gratitude to the lawyer who fought on his behalf by not fully paying his bill….

From the time he built his first Manhattan apartment building, [Trump] left a string of unpaid tabs for the people who worked for him.

The undocumented Polish workers who did the demolition work for that first building, Trump Tower, eventually won a $1.375 million settlement. Since then, scores of lawyers, contractors, engineers and waiters have sued him for unpaid bills or pay. Typically, he responds by asserting that their work did not meet his standard.

That might sound familiar to furloughed federal workers. [Trump] recently retweeted an article, attributed to an anonymous senior official in his administration, arguing that 80 percent of federal workers do “nothing of external value” and that “furloughed employees should find other work, never return and not be paid.”

[Trump] has claimed [absurdly] that “maybe most” federal workers going without pay are “the biggest fan” of his use of the shutdown to fund a border wall. In ordering thousands back to work without pay, he has put the pain for the shutdown on them…

During his years in business, [Trump] rarely displayed an interest in details or expert opinions that might have informed whether his plans would actually work. That pattern has also emerged in the shutdown dispute.

Thirty years ago, his claimed defeat of Mr. Griffin turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

Within months of completing construction on his third casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, he could not pay interest to the bondholders who had financed the project. Having overpaid and overleveraged himself on other deals, banks forced him to turnover or sell almost everything.

His wealthy father helped bail him out. But [Trump] blamed everyone else. He fired nearly all his top executives and stopped paying contractors who had built the casino.

In describing the border wall, [he] has expressed unending confidence in its efficacy. Others, including Representative Will Hurd, a Republican whose Texas district includes part of the border with Mexico, have described it as a tall speed bump, nearly useless without technology to spot illegal crossings immediately and dispatch border agents to quickly respond.

End quote.

Our president has taken 800,000 federal workers and thousands of contractors and private businesses hostage. The Democrats in Congress have done what they can to reopen the government. They have also told the president that they will negotiate border security once everyone is back at work and being paid. Either the president or Congressional Republicans (without the president’s involvement) can end the shutdown. But they have to be willing to see reason and give up their hostages first.

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley

Posted on by

Jason Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale. He previously published a book called How Propaganda Works. His new book is a guidebook to fascism. He doesn’t spend much time on its history. His purpose is to explain how fascism and similar approaches to politics work.

The mechanisms of fascist politics all build on and support one another. They weave a myth of a distinction between “us” and “them”, based on a romanticized fictional past featuring “us” and no “them”, and supported by a corrupt liberal elite, who take our hard-earned money and threaten our traditions. “They” are lazy criminals on whom freedom would be wasted (and who don’t deserve it, in any case). “They” mask their destructive goals with the language of liberalism or “social justice”, and are out to destroy our culture … and make “us” weak. “We” are industrious and law-abiding … “they” are lazy, perverse, corrupt and decadent [188].

Among the mechanisms Stanley cites are: the idea that some kinds of people are inherently better than others; the creation of a mythic past; the widespread use of propaganda; the promotion of conspiracy theories; the use of contradictory statements to demonstrate power and obscure reality; anti-intellectualism; encouraging feelings of victimhood among the majority population; the celebration of law and order and military might; and respect for “traditional family values”.

Stanley doesn’t spend much time on the economic aspects of fascism, except for fascism’s general opposition to labor unions. Perhaps it’s enough to say that fascist leaders are authoritarians and wield extraordinary power over economic affairs. One possible problem with the book is that his use of contemporary examples may suggest that there is no significant difference between fascism and contemporary conservatism (or whatever we should call the reactionary politics of today’s Republican Party). His point, however, is that contemporary “conservatives”, in particular the current occupant of the White House, exhibit behavior that matches many of the distinctive behaviors of history’s best-known fascists.

Finally, one aspect of fascism that sets it apart is what Stanley calls the “FĂĽhrer Principle”:

The father, in fascist ideology, is the leader of the family; the CEO is the leader of the business; the authoritarian leader is the father or CEO of the state. When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.

The pull of fascist politics is powerful. It simplifies human existence, gives us an object, a “them” whose supposed [defects highlight] our own virtue and discipline, encourages us t oidentify with a forceful leader who helps usmakese sense of the world, whose bluntness regarding the “undeserving” people in the world is refreshing…. If the CEO is tough-talking and cares little for democratic institutions, even denigrates them, so much the better. Fascist politics preys on the human frailty that makes our own suffering seem bearable if we know that those we look down upon are being made to suffer more [183].

 

Let Them Eat Cake, But Raise Their Taxes

Posted on by

Newly-elected Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) is the youngest person in Congress. She is becoming very well-known. Last week, she was asked about funding the Green New Deal, the plan to eliminate U.S. carbon emissions and move away from fossil fuels within ten years. This is what she said:

Once you get to the tippie-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%. That doesn’t mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.

Right-wingers immediately screamed that a tax rate that high would be the equivalent of slavery. They didn’t bother to point out that she was referring to the “marginal” tax rate, the percentage at which income over a certain threshold is taxed. That’s very different from taking 60% or 70% of someone’s entire income.

The economist Paul Krugman explains why the 60% or 70% marginal rate is an excellent idea:

The right’s denunciation of AOC’s “insane” policy ideas serves as a very good reminder of who is actually insane.

The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance…. And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rateto be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent.[

Where do these numbers come from? Underlying the Diamond-Saez analysis are two propositions: Diminishing marginal utility and competitive markets.

Diminishing marginal utility [i.e. the value of something at the margin] is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he’ll barely notice it.

What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn’t care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.

So why not tax them at 100 percent? The answer is that this would eliminate any incentive to do whatever it is they do to earn that much money, which would hurt the economy. In other words, tax policy toward the rich should have nothing to do with the interests of the rich, per se, but should only be concerned with how incentive effects change the behavior of the rich, and how this affects the rest of the population.

But here’s where competitive markets come in. In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or other distortions — which is the kind of economy conservatives want us to believe we have — everyone gets paid his or her marginal product. That is, if you get paid $1000 an hour, it’s because each extra hour you work adds $1000 worth to the economy’s output.

In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If a rich man works an extra hour, adding $1000 to the economy, but gets paid $1000 for his efforts, the combined income of everyone else doesn’t change, does it? Ah, but it does — because he pays taxes on that extra $1000. So the social benefit from getting high-income individuals to work a bit harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort — and conversely the cost of their working less is the reduction in the taxes they pay.

Or to put it a bit more succinctly, when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise. The optimal tax rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the maximum possible revenue.

And that’s something we can estimate, given evidence on how responsive the pre-tax income of the wealthy actually is to tax rates. As I said, Diamond and Saez put the optimal rate at 73 percent, Romer at over 80 percent — which is consistent with what AOC said.

An aside: What if we take into account the reality that markets aren’t perfectly competitive, that there’s a lot of monopoly power out there? The answer is that this almost surely makes the case for even higher tax rates, since high-income people presumably get a lot of those monopoly rents.

So AOC, far from showing her craziness, is fully in line with serious economic research. (I hear that she’s been talking to some very good economists.) Her critics, on the other hand, do indeed have crazy policy ideas — and tax policy is at the heart of the crazy.

You see, Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy, based on the claim that tax cuts at the top will have huge beneficial effects on the economy. This claim rests on research by … well, nobody. There isn’t any body of serious work supporting G.O.P. tax ideas, because the evidence is overwhelmingly against those ideas.

Increasing marginal rates as income rises is called “progressive” taxation. It’s fair and practical. Republicans are against it, preferring a “flat” tax, where all income is taxed at the same rate. A flat tax let’s the rich keep more of their income. They say it’s fair and simple, but that’s not why they’re for it.