Saturday Night Prayer Meeting

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To limber up the blogging muscles again, I present a 50-year-old gem from the twilight of Kennedy Rock.



NPR had a piece about this tune on Friday, which I half-heard out of the corner of my ear. It comes from the brief era of Top 40 radio when adult middle-of-the-road hits could chart alongside hot rod and surf music on Clark Weber's Silver Dollar Survey countdown. I've always loved the spring-loaded trombone ensemble schmaltz mixed down just right.

The genre of Kennedy Rock is a personal conceit that popped into my head about 20 years ago. Examples fall along a spectrum of jazz-inflected pop and slickly produced pop with soft-rock "sonorities." Many examples, such as Bobby Vee's "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes", are arranged around nifty chamber orchestras and recorded in rooms whose acoustics you can actually hear. Other, like "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby and The Romantics, start exploring the use of the studio as an "instrument" instead of just a room to record in. I imagine that Kennedy Rock was targeted at young housewives and working girls who hung onto their AM radio listening habit after graduating high school.

All of this is strictly in my own head, you understand. I've been meaning to systematically analyze the "genre's" characteristics, though, because I actually feel that it's a real thing. Two difficulties I've had: one is that this flavor of oldie gets very little airplay, so it's just plain hard to call examples to mind; the other is that I've found it risky to buy MP3 oldies singles because companies that license these songs for reissue often ratfuck the original mixes, thereby spoiling the listening experience. So my research and enjoyment of this (imaginary) genre has been thwarted by sleaze merchants.

Anyway, go ahead and revel in this one, from the age of "Sputnik" bubble gumballs, Universal Studios monster trading cards, and bald, bespectacled AM rock disk jockeys.

Sukiyaki, Kyu Sakamoto (1963, Capitol Records [catalog number not known]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Fixed

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Hello. More later, soon. But I've finally gotten around to fixing the link to my notification, so from now on I'll know pretty quickly when you, the reader, has responded to a post. I hadn't realized how important that was in helping me to stay engaged with the blog, but it is. So, it's fixed.

President North Star gets all enigmatic

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In Santa Monica on Friday, in reference to the NSA Prism project, President Obama said that

... if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Ten-four.

Will a member of the White House press corps ask the President what the problem is and what he intends to do about it? His words sounded to me like a threat.

Incidentally, when I was searching for a transcript of this quote, the top Google hits were nuthouse sites like teaparty.com and breitbart.com. No progressive media have taken note of the statement, as far as I can tell. Naturally, wingnuts will vomit outrage about three words President North Star lays end to end, so their current reaction is more of the same and not to be taken seriously. But he wasn't talking to them: he was talking to civil libertarians, good-government advocates, and regular people who are sickened by the police state infrastructure Cheney and Bush built here over 10 years ago.

Reactionaries have no problem with a well functioning police state as long as they control it. The Obama administration does not fear them. It fears the rest of us. The President took off the Centrist mask yesterday and threatened everyday Americans. I wonder what he meant by it.

Real Scandal No. 1: Global Banking Conspiracy

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Even at the ten-foot-pole distance I keep from news media I am still hearing echoes of the "IRS scandal" in which field personnel applied certain keywords to screen for potential tax-evasion schemes by possibly illegitimate nonprofit political groups. Arguably, depending on the specifics, the story could be important enough to continue dissecting. I don't buy it, though: problem discovered, plausible explanation extracted, congressional hearings held, officials held accountable with loss of jobs, and dire warnings of jackbooted IRS thugs hiding in the hosta patch.

I've heard no echoes, though---not even on The Liberal NPR---about

the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments.

The Libor scandal is last year's news, so corporate media and political celebrities long ago directed everyone to look forward instead of indulging in fingerpointing and recriminations in order to avoid Tearing The Nation Apart With Partisan Bickering. So, fair enough: no echoes.

But have you even heard a peep about this one anywhere outside of Rolling Stone?

Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

Matt Taibbi reported on the ISDAfix, um... fix in April. I understand that this was literally months ago (as of today, at least). But, seriously. Considering Libor and ISDAfix only, this is an issue of price fixing and insider trading that rigs markets encompassing about $880 trillion in financial assets. According to my arithmetic, that's getting close to $1 quadrillion.

If you are interested in the parallels between the crime syndicate and international financial institutions, I recommend that you read Taibbi's whole piece. If you're not that interested, at least keep in mind the figure of $1 quadrillion when you hear Tea Party conservatives complaining about the (phony) looming Social Security bankruptcy or marveling about which planet a stack of dollar bills in the amount of the (falling) federal deficit would reach.

Think about it next time you hear Fiscally Responsible Moderates lament the fact that public-sector pensions, mass transit, and safe bridges are no longer luxuries "we" can afford, because transnational financial pirates routinely loot the funds supporting such projects.

At the very least, do click through to the Taibbi story and read the first paragraph. It's a perfect Fifty50 footnote for any story I tag with the label sympathy for the wingnut.