Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

EMI and Blind Acceptance

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Speaking of the slow, painfully public death of record labels, the new owners of EMI (Terra Firma Capital Partners) are not having an easy time. Surprisingly, musicians are much more difficult to manage than generic widgets.

As the chief executive of Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., Guy Hands controls companies that lease jets, operate natural-gas pipelines, and, most recently, sell music.

The big difference among those businesses is Mr. Hands doesn’t have to worry about keeping the planes or the gas happy. But the musicians signed with EMI Group Ltd. are a different story — and they’ve been less than pleased with the British private-equity mogul.

The Rolling Stones are considering leaving EMI, as Paul McCartney, has.
“He’s either really stupid, or really smart,” says Jazz Summers, who as chairman of an organization called the Music Managers Forum has found some of Mr. Hands’s statements “not very artist-friendly,” but credits him with taking a big gamble on EMI.

[snip]
People who do business with the company say that Mr. Hands has inadvertently contributed greatly to the alienation among artists and their representatives. A series of missives and remarks by Mr. Hands has given many in the artist community the impression that he is out of touch with many realities of the music business — including the need to carefully soothe the artists who actually make the hits.

On top of that, key portions of the restructuring plan Mr. Hands unveiled last week, which includes as many as 2,000 job cuts, some complain, treats music as an ordinary consumer product that can be marketed and sold in various territories like soap.

[From Can New EMI Owner Strike a Chord? – WSJ.com]

“Suckers and Liars, Get me a shovel” Some CEOs are damn devils.

Music is not an object that can be bought and sold on the open market, it is an art, and thus needs to be treated with a bit of respect.

In an interview, Mr. Hands says the music industry spent too much time fighting piracy with lawsuits and other tactics, rather than dealing with the situation. “Instead of spending millions shutting down Napster, it should have been working harder,” to find new ways to convince people to pay for music, he says.

Mr. Hands got off on the wrong foot last October with an internal memo that found its way outside the company. He wrote that EMI should be “more selective” about which artists the company signs, as many don’t work hard enough to promote their music. These performers, he complained, “simply focus on negotiating for the maximum advance… advances which are often never repaid.” Many artists and managers felt insulted by the comment, which was widely discussed in the music business.

When Mr. Hands tried to patch things up at a series of dinners with prominent artist managers, he got a chilly reception. At a London restaurant he described to several managers Terra Firma’s track record, including its stewardship of United Kingdom movie theater chain Odeon Cinemas Ltd., telling them “the cinema business isn’t the movie business — it’s the popcorn business,” recalls Mr. Summers, of the managers’ group. Mr. Summers, whose clients include EMI artists Badly Drawn Boy and the Verve, found the remark insulting to musicians: “I told him he’s dealing with artists, not popcorn.”

It hasn’t helped that Mr. Hands, having ousted EMI’s senior management, still hasn’t named a new chief executive, choosing to run the company himself on an interim basis and bringing in music-industry outsiders for key roles. At the same time, some key industry veterans have been shown the door, including Tony Wadsworth, a respected executive who oversaw the company’s British operations for 20 years — including the long, steady erosion of the company’s market share on its home turf. Among those brought in was Mike Clasper, the former chief executive of the British Airports Authority.

“They’re bringing in a lot of executives from other industries,” said Dave Holmes, manager of Coldplay, one of the biggest acts left on an EMI label. “I would say that’s worrying. It’s not very comforting to me.”

(Digg-enabled full access to complete article here)


(the Sex Pistols play their song, EMI – who subsequently fired them )

Death of the Music Industry, Rolling Stones edition

Seth Anderson1 Comment

More and more high profile artists are realizing the music labels are dinosaurs who only exist to suck up a percentage of profits. Especially for marquee bands, the labels don’t really bring much to the table.

In what is shaping up to be the latest vote of no confidence from a marquee act, EMI Group Ltd. is in danger of losing the Rolling Stones, along with more than 35 years’ worth of their albums, when the group’s current contract with the London-based music company expires in March, according to people familiar with the situation.

A person close to the Stones, led by singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, said the band members are considering their options after their current recording-and-distribution deal with EMI expires in March. The band has been talking to other record labels and other potential partners, according to people in the music business. The band could still decide to stay with EMI and has until about May to make up its mind.

If the Stones leave, their departure would be only the latest in a string of high-profile defections. Under EMI’s previous management the company lost the rights to release new albums by Paul McCartney and Radiohead. Since private-equity owner Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. last summer bought the company for £3.2 billion ($6.28 billion) and ousted the previous management, the pushback from the artist community has grown. Pop singer Robbie Williams’s manager has told the British press his client is considering leaving the label.

The status of Coldplay, perhaps the biggest act left on EMI, may also be in question. People close to EMI had been counting on the band to deliver its still-untitled fourth album in time for release in the first half of this year. But manager Dave Holmes says the band is still working on the album and hasn’t set a delivery date. [snip]

The loss of the Stones could be more damaging than any of the others: Unlike most record contracts, the Stones’ deal with EMI lets the band take all its albums since 1970. The albums in the portion of the Stones catalog currently distributed by EMI — from 1971’s “Sticky Fingers” through 2005’s “A Bigger Bang” — last year sold 395,000 copies in the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

[From Rolling Stones Might Say Goodbye to EMI – WSJ.com]

[Digg-enabled link to to complete article for non-WSJ subscribers here)

Goodbye three martini lunches! David Byrne wrote an article for Wired Magazine recently discussing the six possible models for musicians to follow, ranging from the 360 (Equity) model to self-distribution. Artists like The Rolling Stones no longer need to be in the 360 model anymore, nor do bands like Radiohead, et al. I think the death of the record labels, as we know them, is rapidly approaching a certainty, and I couldn’t be happier, fitter.

China Bags

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Pope gets bagged

Interesting development, especially since most of the plastic bags issued by US retailers are manufactured in China.

The Chinese government says it is banning shops from handing out free plastic bags from June this year, in a bid to curb pollution.
Production of ultra-thin plastic bags will also be banned, the State Council said in a statement.

Instead, people will be encouraged to use baskets or reusable cloth bags for their shopping, the council said.

[snip]
The council also called for greater recycling efforts from rubbish collectors, and suggested financial authorities should consider higher taxes on the production and sale of plastic bags. [From BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China announces plastic bag ban]

If China does in fact start taxing the bag manufacturers, will this encourage more US retailers to consider other options, like cloth bags? Hemp bags?

Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers

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“Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. 1: Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969” (Gram Parsons, Flying Burrito Brothers)

Excellent. I’ve long been partial to Cosmic American music, discovering it first through Uncle Tupelo and Michelle Shocked, then working my way backwards in time to Gram Parsons, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, The Band’s first few albums, and others. Being a musical historian in the age of re-releasing frenzy does have advantages.

Live at the Avalon Ballroom is the rock equivalent of the Jackson Pollock discovered at a flea market, or the first-edition William Faulkner found in the dollar bin at a used book store. These recordings of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ two shows in San Francisco in April 1969 were long buried in the Grateful Dead vaults (which many listeners speak of in the same terms explorers once used for El Dorado) until Dave Prinz, the co-founder of Amoeba Records, tracked them down and worked for more than a year to secure permissions from the Dead’s soundman, Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Prinz compiled the recordings into a 2xCD set (one for each show) and released them on the newly launched Amoeba Records label– its second release, in fact. The title, Archives Volume 1: Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969, teases with the tacit promise of a second volume– more buried treasure.

For Parsons fans, this constitutes a major event– perhaps more anticipated than even Rhino’s long-awaited reissue of his two solo albums in 2006– not only because it contains numerous unheard covers, but primarily because Parsons didn’t leave a whole lot of live material behind when he died in 1973. Even the supposedly “live” medley from Grievous Angel was just a studio re-creation, and the real live recordings that survive are marred by poor sound quality or, in some cases, poor performances. Live documents of Parsons’ short tenure with the original Flying Burrito Brothers line-up are even scarcer. What makes Live at the Avalon Ballroom so special is that the performance is just as good as the sound quality. As professional hanger-on Pamela “Burrito Sister” Des Barres writes in the liners, “I have literally been waiting for this album for decades.”

[Click to read more about Gram Parsons : Gram Parsons Archives Volume 1: Gram Parsons with the Flying Burrito Brothers Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969: Pitchfork Record Review]

Grammatical Errors
Parsons died too young.

FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills

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I'm With Stupid

What a joke. Is this why the Telecoms want immunity?

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ”was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

”We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report show

[Click to read more of FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills – New York Times]

The ACLU is calling for the full release of the report, as something doesn’t quite add up.

Americans should be extremely concerned when the FBI’s failure to pay its bills on time puts our national security at risk. We’re down the constitutional rabbit hole when lack of payment, and not the lack of a warrant, prevents the FBI from wiretapping. It seems the telecoms, who are claiming they were just being “good patriots” when they allowed the government to spy on us without warrants, are more than willing to pull the plug on national security investigations when the government falls behind on its bills. To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail.

The information released by the OIG is yet another example of the complete disarray at the FBI. The FBI has failed to address its serious management issues – continuing to turn a blind eye to its internal problems. Yet against all odds, instead of being chided for not addressing these problems, the agency has asked for and received even more authority from Congress.

Six and a half years after 9/11, the bureau’s mismanagement still threatens our national security.

Until proper oversight is imposed on the intelligence community, our security and our rights will remain at risk. As Congress is seeking to further expand surveillance powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we urge them to take these facts into account. The bureau must be held accountable. If the FBI can’t even manage its checkbook properly, how can we trust it to ensure that our rights are being protected?”

For more information on FISA and surveillance, go to:
www.aclu.org/fisa

[From American Civil Liberties Union : ACLU Says FBI Can’t Manage Checkbook]

DNA Tests Free Yet Another Innocent

Seth Anderson0 comment

How do prosecutors and arresting officers sleep at night?

After nearly 27 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, Charles Chatman walked free on Thursday, the 15th wrongfully convicted prisoner in Dallas County to be exonerated by DNA testing since 2001.

The innocence claims of seven other Dallas-area prisoners are pending, thanks in large part to a crime laboratory that, unlike others in Texas, has preserved evidence going back as long as three decades.

[snip]
Dressed in a new blue blazer, gray slacks, blue shirt and red tie bought by his lawyers, Mr. Chatman said he harbored no feelings of animosity toward the neighbor who had misidentified him as her rapist, earning him a 99-year sentence. But he said he felt he was victimized because he was black.

“I want to let the world know what happened,” he said, “I won’t shy away from that.”

Mr. Chatman, who had been locked up since age 20, said he had lost three chances for release by insisting to the Parole Board, “I never committed the crime.”

He said he wanted to work alongside his lawyers, Jeff Blackburn, Natalie Roetzel and Michelle Moore, to help others he had met in prison prove their innocence. The lawyers work with the Innocence Project of Texas, a consortium of university law clinics that has been using DNA evidence to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted.

[From 15th Dallas County Inmate Since ’01 Is Freed by DNA – New York Times]

Shouldn’t DNA tests be mandated as routine procedure?

Works of Igor Stravinsky

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“Works of Igor Stravinsky” (Sony Classics)

Pretty reasonably priced set, I might pick it up.

With Works of Igor Stravinsky, Sony/BMG is offering Sony Classics’ massive Stravinsky box of 22 CDs, which once retailed at a faint-inducing price tag, for less than one-sixth of the original cost. Certainly more of these will get around than the old “Recorded Legacy” box did; so prohibitively expensive, such boxes would sit at the counter of finer classical music stores for years as a never-purchased luxury item. In the new edition, you don’t get much aside from the same 22 CDs in cardboard sleeves and a paper-thin booklet, which contains a highly generalized, four-page-long appreciation of Stravinsky’s artistry and as close to the most basic projection of the recording data as one can imagine.

Aside from the marketing angle, Sony/BMG’s Works of Igor Stravinsky has all the vicissitudes of the original Sony Classical set, apart from the old set’s monolithic dimensions. No other composer born in the 1880s — unless you count Leopold Stokowski as a “composer” — left behind a more extensive body of recordings than Stravinsky. Stravinsky didn’t make his first recording until he was 43 years old, only picking up conducting as an avocation a couple of years after that. The vast majority of Stravinsky’s recordings were made for CBS Masterworks starting in 1957 — when he was 75 years old — and extending to 1967, when he made his last public appearances, and Works of Igor Stravinsky includes, in one way or another, some 90 percent of the music Stravinsky is known to have composed. Save the inclusion of both the Firebird Ballet and its corresponding suite, alternate incarnations of works are not found here; the dreaded, posthumously discovered Sonata in F sharp minor for piano is likewise lacking, but so are several of Stravinsky’s other piano pieces and the Three Pieces for String Quartet.

[From allmusic [Works of Igor Stravinsky]]

Bound to be some good stuff here, $33 bucks for 22 discs sounds like a good cost-per-minute ratio. 433 tracks.

Terrorism Theater

Seth Anderson0 comment

Here’s why I hate to fly, post 9/11. All of the counter-terrorism measures enacted at US airports are just prop-comic jokes – supremely unfunny ones to boot. Shoe bombs? Liquid explosives? Only on television or in James Bonds films, not practical in the real world. Restricting wine openers and cuticle scissors? Ridiculous. One can make a deadly weapon out of a myriad of devices, including a credit card or a photo id! Try bending a card you no longer need in half, that sucker quickly becomes a sharp, sharp blade. Confiscating bottles of liquid in huge garbage barrels? If the bottles of water are so dangerous, why are they kept in the crowded areas of airports for hours? Obviously nobody is really scared of these liquids, yet the TSA guards become rapidly belligerent if one attempts to notice this fact, or any other inane Terrorism Theater prop.

Does any of the Terrorism Theater Kabuki make us safer? Doubtful.

Had Enough for a Long Time

Patrick Smith (a commercial pilot) explores the topic in detail:

But of all the contradictions and self-defeating measures T.S.A. has come up with, possibly none is more blatantly ludicrous than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. What makes it ludicrous is that tens of thousands of other airport workers, from baggage loaders and fuelers to cabin cleaners and maintenance personnel, are subject only to occasional random screenings when they come to work.

These are individuals with full access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a high percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. The fact that crew members, many of whom are former military fliers, and all of whom endured rigorous background checks prior to being hired, are required to take out their laptops and surrender their hobby knives, while a caterer or cabin cleaner sidesteps the entire process and walks onto a plane unimpeded, nullifies almost everything our T.S.A. minders have said and done since September 11th, 2001. If there is a more ringing let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it.

I’m not suggesting that the rules be tightened for non-crew members so much as relaxed for all accredited workers. Which perhaps urges us to reconsider the entire purpose of airport security:

[Click to read more of The Airport Security Follies – Jet Lagged – Air Travel – Opinion – New York Times Blog]

I just drive, or don’t go at all, if at all possible.

RIAA Hates the iPod

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wired_rip_sampler

Of course, this means the RIAA also hates most of its own best music-purchasing customers.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings. [snip]

The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal. At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG’s chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Copying a song you bought is “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy,’ ” she said.

[From Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use – washingtonpost.com]

I think the music industry would be in much worse shape if the iPod revolution hadn’t happened.

—
update, poorly worded WaPo story (surprised?).

The only problem: No such claim was made. What RIAA lawyer Ira Schwartz wrote in a supplemental brief was: “Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .MP3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.”

The critical phrase there is “shared folder” because the rest of the brief makes clear that the RIAA is claiming that Howell not only ripped his CDs but also put them in his shared folder in Kazaa, thus making them available for worldwide distribution. The RIAA has successfully argued that mere presence of copyright files in a shared folder constitutes “distribution” under copyright law.

“This is a garden-variety case with a very typical dispute over what constitutes distribution,” Eric Goldman, director of Santa Clara University Law School’s High-Tech Law program, said in a telephone interview.

from CIO Today and elsewhere.

Telecom Immunity Priorities

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bush’s buddies, the telecom giants, are still worried they might have to answer for their crimes.

From the Senate floor, Ted Kennedy just cut through all the crap:
“The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retro-active immunity. No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he’s willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.”

[From Daily Kos: Kennedy on Telecom Immunity]

Zing!

(H/T)

Constituency of One for FCC Chair

Seth Anderson1 Comment

 

His Royal Highness, Bushy, of course. There aren’t many government officials who can keep their jobs when they are unpopular with the Congress, with the citizenry, and with the industry being regulated.

Today, the Federal Communications Commission is set to ram through two measures likely to roil the media and telecommunications industries and deepen political dissatisfaction with the agency’s chairman.

Kevin Martin, a 41-year-old Republican, has already drawn heavy criticism with his determination to pass a rule making it easier for media companies to own both newspapers and television stations in the top 20 markets. The five-member commission is expected to pass that rule and another saying that no single cable company can serve more than 30% of the nation’s cable subscribers.
[snip]
In a highly partisan capital, Mr. Martin is unusual in that he is coming under attack by members of both parties and several industries. The cable restriction, for instance, has stoked the anger of an industry that expected an orthodox laissez-faire Republican as chairman, only to find an aggressive regulator.
[From Industry Seethes as FCC Sets Curbs]

Mr. Martin’s only government experience seems to be his work on the Shrub’s 2000 Presidential Campaign, and on Kenneth Star’s impeachment theater.

Mr. Martin worked as a telecommunications lawyer in private practice and briefly assisted independent counsel Kenneth Starr in 1997 during the Whitewater probe. Later, he left Washington for Austin, Texas, joining then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Mr. Martin’s wife, Cathie, whom he met at Harvard Law School, also worked on the campaign.

In 2001, the newly elected Mr. Bush appointed Mr. Martin as an FCC commissioner. His wife worked for Vice President Dick Cheney for several years before moving to the White House’s communications office.

Despite what Amy Schatz asserts in the article, there aren’t many consumer groups who think Mr. Martin’s tenure is worth celebration. There might be some consumer groups who are members of the Christian-Taliban who celebrate Martin’s quest to “clean the smut out of the airways”, and protect our precious ears from dangerous words like fuck and shit, but these consumer groups don’t have the support of most of the nation. The only group who would praise Mr. Martin on the record is Consumer Union’s Gene Kimmelman, for some reason:

Consumer groups are among those who offer kind words for Mr. Martin. “He’s been as accessible as any chairman in the past 25 years to consumer interests. He’s reached out for input,” says Gene Kimmelman, vice president for federal and international affairs at Consumers Union.

Is indecency on cable really what is important?

Soon Mr. Martin’s concerns about indecency on television began to steer him into conflict with the cable and broadcast-TV industries. His staff proposed record fines against broadcast networks for showing racy programming. Mr. Martin suggested that the FCC should fine broadcasters for each instance of a profanity used during a show, instead of just one fine per broadcast.

Mr. Martin pushed for a fine in cases of inadvertent broadcast of profanities, such as an incident involving U2 singer Bono during a live broadcast of the Golden Globes awards. This summer, a federal appeals court sided with the broadcasters and tossed out the agency’s decision.

Mr. Martin has suggested that indecency laws should apply to cable programming, prompting an outcry about free speech. Profit-spinning cable shows such as “The Sopranos” and “Real Sex” on HBO are rich in profanity and sexual images.

Note that Mr. Martin doesn’t have much support:

Intense lobbying in Congress, the FCC and the White House paid off, as a stream of lawmakers began calling the FCC and sending letters decrying Mr. Martin’s plan. Internally, several FCC commissioners complained about the data Mr. Martin’s staff relied on in the report. Ultimately, Mr. Martin was forced to drop his proposal.

“Because we didn’t agree to [a-la-carte pricing] early in his tenure, I believe, and I believe the evidence is overwhelming, that he embarked on a punitive regulatory regime on the industry,” says Mr. McSlarrow, the cable association president. He says private enterprise is “more likely to get it right than someone who’s never been in the business world.”

The media-ownership rules up for a vote today have also sparked a backlash, this time in Congress as legislators complain Mr. Martin is rushing the issue onto the agenda. Yesterday, a bipartisan group of 25 senators warned in a letter to Mr. Martin that they will pursue legislation to block his plan if the FCC adopts it today.

On Friday, former and current Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Barack Obama threatened to block FCC funding to implement the new media-ownership rules. Veteran Michigan congressman John Dingell, head of the House committee that oversees the FCC, said he is “rapidly losing confidence” and recently opened a broad investigation into Mr. Martin’s management of the agency.

Seems only the White House is Mr. Martin’s supporter. Remind you of anyone?
(Digg-enabled full access to the complete article here)

John Nichols of the Nation writes:

The Federal Communications Commission has, as expected, voted along party lines to approve the demand of Rupert Murdoch and other communications-industry moguls for a loosening of limits on media monopolies in American cities.

Now, the real fight begins.

There was never any doubt that FCC chair Kevin Martin, a Bush-Cheney administration appointee and acolyte, would lead the two other Republican members of the commission to a 3-2 endorsement of a move to begin dismantling the historic “newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership” ban which has long served as the only barrier to the buying by one powerful individual or corporation of newspapers, television and radio stations and other media outlets in a community.
[Click to read more FCC Votes for Monopoly, Congress Must Vote for Democracy]

WaMu and Bankruptcy Reform

Seth Anderson0 comment

Reserved Light

Atrios linked to this news tidbit about how Blowback’s a bitch

Washington Mutual Inc. got what it wanted in 2005: A revised bankruptcy code that no longer lets people walk away from credit card bills.

The largest U.S. savings and loan didn’t count on a housing recession. The new bankruptcy laws are helping drive foreclosures to a record as homeowners default on mortgages and struggle to pay credit card debts that might have been wiped out under the old code, said Jay Westbrook, a professor of business law at the University of Texas Law School in Austin and a former adviser to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Westbrook said. “They wanted to make sure that people kept paying their credit cards, and what they’re getting is more foreclosures.”

Washington Mutual, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. spent $25 million in 2004 and 2005 lobbying for a legislative agenda that included changes in bankruptcy laws to protect credit card profits, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan Washington group that tracks political donations.

The banks are still paying for that decision. The surge in foreclosures has cut the value of securities backed by mortgages and led to more than $40 billion of writedowns for U.S. financial institutions. It also reached to the top echelons of the financial services industry.
[From Bloomberg.com: Exclusive]

Prior to the 2005 reforms, if one had to choose between defaulting on a credit card and defaulting on a mortgage, the choice was pretty obvious. Not so much anymore. I wonder which of the 75 Senators who voted Yea would change their vote now? (Hillary Clinton abstained for some reason)

Louis Armstrong American Hero

Seth Anderson3 Comments


“The Essential Louis Armstrong” (Louis Armstrong)

Louis Armstrong is an American hero.

As David Margolick recounts, a 21 year old journalist student by the name of Larry Lubenow ignored the instructions of his editor, and asked Louis Armstrong about what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement of Eisenhower era America….

With the connivance of the bell captain, [Lubenow] snuck into Mr. Armstrong’s suite with a room service lobster dinner. And Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow stuck initially to his editor’s script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print [like, mother-fucker, perhaps? Stupid New York Times pearl-clutching.]. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.

Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.

Mr. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. “They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with happy music,” he had said. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?”

Mr. Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to get it in his own paper; nor would the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Mr. Armstrong could have said such things, put it on the national wire, at least until Mr. Lubenow could prove he hadn’t made it all up. So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he’d written. “Don’t take nothing out of that story,” Mr. Armstrong declared. “That’s just what I said, and still say.” He then wrote “solid” on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.

Jury Decides Against Knicks

Seth Anderson1 Comment

During the trial, testimony by witnesses made the inner workings of the Garden, which like the Knicks is owned by Cablevision, appear dysfunctional, hostile and lewd. The Knick’s star guard, Stephon Marbury, testified that he had sex with a team intern in the trunk of his car after a group outing to a strip club in 2005.

[From Jury Decides Against Thomas and Knicks Owner – New York Times]

What kind of tricked-out trunk does Mr. Marbury have anyway? Is there a bed in it? a futon? I’m curious.

update: ooops. As we presumed, just a funny typo.

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a 2005 sexual encounter between Stephon Marbury of the Knicks and a team intern. Mr. Marbury testified that it took place in his truck, not in the trunk of his car.

Marbury Trunk

Love Me I am A Liberal

Seth Anderson1 Comment

No wonder I’ve never considered running for president (well, besides the little rule about having to be born in the US). Per Corpus Callosum, we see that the candidates for president, especially the ones who are well funded and likely to win a primary or two are all really Republicans, and the Republicans are really fascists/authoritarians by another name.

USprimaries 2007

So I wonder who is against the Drug War? Probably Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich only. I’ll admit I actually haven’t been paying attention to the platforms of specific candidates, other than in a vague way. Data like this is probably why – none of them are talking to me anyway. (Especially Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, based on this chart. John Edwards is the most left of the likely candidates, but something irks me about him too. )

Data from here.

My score? Took the test, and in no surprise to anyone who regularly glances at this page, I scored way, way to the left. Live and Let Live. Or as the Gnostic Christ said: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

love me I am a liberal

The Political Compass – Test:
Economic Left/Right: -7.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.31

About The Political Compass™

In the introduction, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line.

If we recognize that this is essentially an economic line it’s fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That’s the one that the mere left-right scale doesn’t adequately address. So we’ve added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.